You don't like sci fi. Westworld has a ton of action. This phenomenon of having to carefully piece together abstract clues like in West World and Lost is relatively recent, not a marker of sci fi and something you seem to like based on your West World posts. There is a massive gap between not explaining everything in detail like 2001: A Space Odyssey did and teasing new clues every week to a tv audience. I'm afraid the idea that guessing the plot from clues is now the de facto meaning of a "smart movie" or more cerebral. To me it is more of a Sherlock Holmes exercise in deduction, not cerebral. What is the major theme of the movie in your opinion?
I'd say Contact broke me in to this kind of movie, and I remember being so damn disappointed for the same reasons other posters mentioned here when I first watched Contact at the theatres many moons ago.
If I got this wrong let me know. I mean I had to watch matrix like 3 times before I could even figure out what was going on in the plot, let alone decipher a theme. But It seemed to me that the major running theme was like Matrix ( Choice when you know the future from the Oracle ), LOST/Big Fish ( Choice like Charlie dealt with, as in he was resigned to knowing he would die in the future, or Choice like the Big Fish guy just doing whatever he wanted in the face of knowing his future death). I haven't finished LOST yet by the way. Still on season 3. In this film the Aliens are supposedly trying to give us this non linear sight so that we can save them in the future. And Adams is trying to deal with the new power or sight like Charlie and the guy in the Big Fish movie. Ultimately her choice is not to use it to help herself. She could choose not have the baby, or she could choose to try to save her child's life. She doesn't do either. For me, Big Fish's version of it was more interesting because it showed you a way to live your life having been given the sight. He can't change his fate to die, but he can choose to amplify his life experience in the absence of fear. So he goes for broke at every instance. This movie never really gets to a possible solution for Adams or how it changes her. It's more like well just deal with it, you have the power, good luck with using it because it's irrelevant to helping your life and or the death of your child, but please DO use it to help save us Aliens from dying down the road anyway in-spite of everything we just told you, and now we octopus out. But on other levels it also dealt with Communication ( Cultural Gaps ), Space Time, and Apocalypse ( the movie, sort of the end of Rome type deal ) themes but didn't really dive into them all that deeply either.
Did sleep on one thing and when I woke up I realized I have to make one slight retraction, as the one alien on an individual level did in fact deal with the theme near the end, as he must have known his fate in the explosion, which would explain his tardiness to the meeting as who wants to go out like that, but I still have a hard time reconciling the fact that if the aliens can only see time, but they cannot change it, then why are they coming to the humans and asking them to do exactly that. So really struggling there.
I think your looking at time too linearly. They're not trying to change events in the future because there is no future or past.
Here is one question I have, if you are the little girl, and you can see all non linear time, and let's say everything about your life is crap, for example, let's say Adams and the guy beat her to pulp every night, lock her up in a cell, and that's her life and she can see it, and she has cancer, and she can see that and she's going to die and suffer, and she can see that she has no influence on anyone or anything positive, nothing good is going to happen anywhere at any time, and that every moment of time just sucks, the entire universe and the aliens all die because she had cancer, then my question would be what is her motivation to fulfill the process of life and time ( like Adams and Aliens do ) and go through with that process, following every step? Adams and the Aliens all have something positive to gain by accepting their fates in-spite of something bad, but what if you didn't? Now that I think might make an more interesting movie, because therein could lie a possible acceptance of evil.
I'm in the camp that puts this movie as solid, but nothing groundbreaking and overall "too slow" (not "I want more action", "give me explosions", yada, yada... just too slow). Contact and Interstellar did it much better. Still liked it though. Also, side note, but from a cinematography perspective, I get that some directors want to go with a consistent tome... but I just don't like movies generally where the tone is consistently grey and dark. Again, another thing Contact/Interstellar do differently. There's plenty of high-light scenes in those two, and they still come off as very science fictiony
I liked it but the ending let me down. Instead of some Spoiler time bending conclusion which seems to be en vogue I wish there was something more realistic. It seemed the movie was a somewhat realistic take on what would happen if we were in the position of trying to communicate, but I prefer and ending where Spoiler love isn't part of the conclusion.
I just saw this and I thought despite the formulaic constructs of a sci-fi alien invasion and doomsday scenario that it was a solid flick. The concept of time-space time physics should he well established by now to any modestly educated viewer, so I found it very easy to follow. However, being a parent... The entire future scenario was just gut-wrenching. Talk about a downer.
For those that liked this movie, you should read the short story it is based upon. It'll basically be spoiled, but I really enjoyed it. If I remember correctly it was about. 45 minute read.
My simple mind found the main them to be summarized as "it's worth it." I'm sure there are a lot more philosophical and maybe even scientific themes than can be derived. Possibly could even view the same thing in a more pessimistic light (a la True Detective), but I choose to view it in the positive light. But anyway, that to me is the obvious, hit-you-over-the-head theme, and I think it hits pretty hard.
