Denis Villeneuve
2016
116 minutes
This is the movie you thought was Interstellar that multiple friends told you to watch. You are just now getting around to watching it and fixing an anomaly in the universe. People think you will like this for a variety of reasons. It's "smart" sci-fi, there's a linguistics element to it, and it has quite a good stirring soundtrack. And the smoke aliens are quite spooky and weird and atmospheric. Plus there's a "twist" that is only slightly ruined for you going in since you immediately forget it is a key part of the plot.
In the end, it's pretty okay, especially for a "Hollywood blockbuster" sort of sci-fi film. From what you can tell, it's beautifully shot, but on your phone or laptop screen it is very dark. You can barely see what is happening for good chunks of the film. This hampers your enjoyment a bit, but that's what you get for not seeing it in the theater like blockbusters are meant to be seen.
It feels like a cop-out making excuses for films in this matter, but to some degree it's also true. Most films were not meant for you to watch on a cell phone screen while waiting on a bus in the afternoon sun. They are not meant for watching on a laptop screen while having your morning tea at a coffee shop. Some films want to show you intoxicating chiaroscuro mixes of black and grey while rattling your bones with a loud Dolby soundtrack. They demand your undivided attention for an entire three hours with no ability to pause or go back and review what you may have missed. They don't want your eyes drawn down looking at closed captions, they want every bit of your focus on the screen. They don't want you pausing and looking at Wikipedia, they want an informed audience who already knows everything they are supposed to know to enjoy it going in. Patient genius viewers under ideal viewing conditions. Sorry if you can't understand Amy Adams if she mumbles a few lines. Too bad if you can't understand some other actor's unexpected New Zealand accent. Keep up, dummy.
A significant part of this film is Amy Adams' linguist trying to find some sort of Rosetta Stone so they can communicate with the aliens. This is a fantastic premise for a sci-fi story, and the writers are happy to play with the concept, dragging in some smart and thoughtful concepts like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, essentially the idea that the language we speak influences and affects our perception of reality. There are a lot of sci-fi stories that have done plots where figuring out how to communicate with aliens was a major part of the plot, and doing so was key to "humanizing" them enough to come to some mutual respect.
Obviously there was a very good episode of Star Trek (TNG) along these lines, where one of the alien races they encounter has a language that is so heavily based around folklore from their culture that it is nearly impossible to get a toehold on translating ("Darmok"). The central plot point of that episode is the alien captain repeating to Picard (who is stranded on a hostile planet with him for reasons that you forget) a phrase that amounts to "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" and throwing him a weapon. This baffles Picard and he initially rejects the gesture, to the alien captain's frustration. Eventually he figures out that the allusion is to a story in their culture where enemies have to communicate to overcome a common threat, which Picard figures out a little bit too late to avert a tragedy. You get choked up thinking about it, which means a lot since this is literally the only Star Trek episode you've seen from beginning to end.
This concept was influential enough that it ended up as a plot point in some fiction you wrote around the time of the pandemic. In your story, some strangers (including a hotel maid) who speak different languages and hare having significant communication problems are gathered around a television set watching a poorly-overdubbed soap opera. The characters all have their own level of devotion to this program, from casual recent viewers to lapsed former fanatics to completely baffled rookies. The soap opera serves as a sort of Rosetta stone for the characters to start communicating--and miscommunicating in a whole new set of ways. This leads to a major misunderstanding at the climax, which is dramatic and embarrassing and hopefully a little funny. It's one of your favorite bits of fiction you've written, and you had a lot of fun composing it. Poor and ambiguous communication is quite a fun plot device to work with, if it's done well. You're certainly a fan of it in the stories you consume, and this movie will certainly scratch that itch for you.
Time to choose something different: