So a while back I did a blog about the movie Arrival and how they'd done the movie like Interstellar pissed me off. Garbage. That movie was garbage.
Apparently someone thinks the opposite. The Way 'Interstellar' Changed The 'Arrival' Script Further Explains The Heptapods' Purpose And The Film's Ending
Nice to know then that's exactly what happened (Interstellar derailed what could have been a much better movie). Arrival might have been about space colonization and such instead of non-linear time bending silliness.
Oh so thankfully one person understands the language and can see the past, present and future all at once and she's not crazy! Sure the military thought so and they almost killed her twice.. but whatever.. the Heps got their message and gift across. How about come help us out now humans?
Little do they know that despite their gift, it's still very likely that humanity will self-annihilate before they can 'help'. The gift cost a little girl a full life. And again yes she was given life and did live for a while but she died suffering. How can you DO that? why would you even start a relationship when you know it will end on that revelation and do nothing about it?! What kind of message is that?!
"Better to know better and love and lose anyway than to ADOPT and live happily ever after on giant stacks of money because you're the only human alive that can see the future! Not that you'd need to because you SPOKE TO ALIENS!"
The article mentions that the script originally called for the Heps expecting that help to come in their 'now' which for us is 3000 years from now.
Having seen Passengers recently.. and how that movie did a good job stating how far along we could be if and when we do start getting out there. Robot ships, colonies everywhere.. insanely wealthy worlds.. probably covered in massive ghettos for the other 99.999999~ percent.. It might not even take us 3000 years to get to the Heptapod homeworld. But certainly by then we'd have so many worlds behind us and insane technology.. the Heptapods would be ants to humanity.
This puts even more strain on a weak story because that means the Heps can affect the past present and future. Means they are far more advanced than we are now at least to get here, but that they also had an opportunity to correct their course and were otherwise good with where they are at.. except that whatever they did to their past and present etc doesn't amount to a hill of beans because they are in trouble in the future.
Lets visit one of the only, if not the only intelligent alien races we can find out their and ask them for help. I go slant eyed and say.. humans?! you chose humanity?! even as the only other race capable of manned space travel.. and we're barely managing. We don't have the social and economical infrastructure to build anything big enough to save ourselves nevermind some distant planet. Sorry guys, non-linear cognizance and lets assume an eventual ability to communicate with ourselves non-linearly isn't going to help much.
Imagine someone telling child Hitler he'd become a world leader and end up slaughtering millions. Could you not please? I can see how that version of the script would have been difficult. But affecting our past means paradoxes and lost progress. AND different problems. we'd have to provide all the knowledge WE have like the Heptapods did when making an intervention. That this intervention 3000 years into the past didn't alter their history significantly is interesting. They must be that far away that seeding humanity with the knowledge if not also the tools to eventually be able to step in and help them and it not cause paradoxes for them is interesting. But are they time travelers? Do their have ships 3000 years in their past? Not very clear.
Sending back everything we've learned even 100 years would be insane. But when do you go back to. How far do you go back?
I find it interesting because I got so pissed at all the recent set-backs I had to deal with. Finding the old saved games and reloading them, or at least the ability to reload them when needed is.. liberating.
But how far back do I need to go? I need my Argy back. But I'd lost a female Argy a long time back. Getting another one wouldn't be too much of a hassle, but that one was special. It was Morgcules the Twoth. How far back do you go. When you go back do you mention that you got the ability to communicate non-linearly from aliens? passing that mission on when you go back.
Few movies have managed time travel well.. and Arrival just isn't clear.
Contact did the lets build a Mass Effect relay. That's pretty clear and relatable. It's building a particle collider, or telescope array, or a space station. An international effort that doesn't require but that does benefit from different countries working together.
At some point we might have to work together like that.. or in the meantime we'll just leave it to companies like SpaceX to lead the way to space exploration and colonization. That builds up the population and economic base from which thousands of ships can be built. Many colonies could be built around our solar system and prosper so long as their a practical use for them being supported.
Problem right now is that we're having trouble working out how to feed humanity here on Earth. Pushing a billion people to leave to colonize the moon, mars, and moons of Jupiter sounds like a great plan, as long as they can feed themselves. I don't see anything growing on the moon, mars, or the moons of Jupiter and until we can sort that out, colonies might not be self sufficient enough to support billions of human lives.
Arrivals focusing on the alien language as a massive boon for humanity bit is also great and all and even the non-linear time aspect are well explained, but I just don't buy it. How's that better than something concrete like a generation ship to send a billion frozen people to help the Heptapods? If we get there 2500 years from now we could have a massive city built on their planet with many minds capable of tackling whatever it is they need help with. And they certainly don't need to be the best and brightest... How do you tell the poorest billion people on Earth that well.. look we have this thing we need you to do.. yeah.. just get on the ship.
This idea that both movies though couldn't tell their stories about science and space without defocusing on the personal struggles of ALL characters, not just a core couple annoys me. Like fuck I need to care about these characters. Sorry but I just don't. Murphy maybe.. but no.. I don't give a shit about the dad. I went into that movie knowing it wouldn't tell a good story about the science.. so it didn't even let me down. I felt bad that I bothered to watch it.
Like why isn't the space colonization important? actually building cities not sending someone down to see what's happening. You send probes down not people. And why aren't the other characters important? Why do movies focus on a couple of characters and just ignore everything and everyone else. Especially for a movie with so much dead time (Arrival). You're given all this time to process the non-linear time crap when they wrap it up at the end anyway very clearly. What was all the ambiguity and flashback bullshit for? How about I DON'T EVEN HAVEA KID! I DON'T HAVE A HUSBAND! THESE AREN'T FLASHBACKS.. easily an hour of that movie would have been used for something less idiotic. Or at the very least make it obvious that SHE thought she was crazy.
But again, Amy Adams was a bad casting decision because even that never came across. It didn't feel like she felt anything about her visions. Or came to any spectacular realization or her ability.
They could have done that and told us more about Ian, about the other efforts instead of saying everyone goes radio silent and pulls their guns out creating an idiotic global Mexican stand-off. While the benign aliens are watching.
I'm going to have to watch Contact again. District 9. Maybe Independence Day.. so many great science fiction movies that don't drag on with such hollow mind numbing scripts.
Also, Dragon's Egg needs to be made into a movie.
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So.. Contact.. it's been something like 20 years. Kind of interesting that this happens tomorrow:
NASA to announce a 'discovery beyond our solar system' tomorrow
The signal to noise and signal degradation arguments probably aren't that bad. Yes background noise is an issue the further away an alien civilization is, but so long as the source of a particular signal is constant and we detect something coming from it, we could focus on listening to it. Meaning it makes more sense to build ever larger receivers for that signal.
So Contact fucked up the intro. It should have started on the ground with a radio antenna and a radio signal so it would be clear that we're chasing back our radio footprint at the speed of light. And so the question of how far our radio bubble extends and IF a suitably advanced civilization could receive our signals. They might not be able to decode them but as long as they receive them they could pinpoint where they are coming from.
I'd like to know if there are any books or movies that have addressed that topic, other than Futurama. What happens when aliens start listening to our radio transmissions.