I have only half-finished it yet but I need to rant.
movie spoilers
Aliens have landed at 12 locations on Earth. One of them being the USA. American military is working with a pair of scientists–a linguist and a physicist–to figure out their language.
Meanwhile the American public is terrified of these aliens who have done nothing but landed and attempted to communicate. They are mad that the American military has not tried to blow them to smithereens. The baddies–China and Russia–are mounting a military operation against the aliens.
I cannot even…
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Highly recommend the short story it’s based on. Doesn’t have any propaganda nonsense from the movie, and I find the concept works better in the literary medium.
Yeah, this aspect of the movie drives me crazy, too.
Just accept that the CHINABAD stuff is projection, but the movie is pretty great otherwise!I don’t think Villeneuve did it to paint China in a bad way. There’s a point to be served for making China “the bad guys” (although they aren’t). Watch the movie to the end, and we can discuss it.
Also, bear in mind that the US military might have interfered with the script, since that’s their term for lending assets to make a film.
Of course the US military intervened. The film’s depiction of its world’s geopolitical realities is entirely shaped by it. It kinda looks like the world is just divided over self-serving bureaucratic governments engaged in petty squabbles which can be transcended if we just co-operate or reach across the aisle so to speak. The problem I have is that it portrays all countries as equally belligerent and that US just happened to have the only linguist in the world to whom it ocurred that the first mention of “weapons” might be a mistranslation or a misunderstanding. Meanwhile back in real life the American military is the most violent organisation by margins that can only be measured in astronomical units.
Yeah at the end it’s an american movie so of course they’re going to be the heroes, at least China wasn’t portrayed as badly as Russia that iirc
spoiler
end up doing some kind of mutiny and killing between them? :::
Something that i’ve noticed in these kind of movies is that the chinese representative is always a general, always a military guy, they never have a CPC guy, or a scientist. It’s as if China is a warmonger or smt in their minds.
I liked the concept about language changing the way you think. reminded me a bit about MGSV.
Despite the issues with the worldbuilding, it is still one of my favorites.
Always projection.
Still a good flick though
My dad and I watched interstellar at the theater when it came out. Halfway through it the characters arrive at some icy base. The icy base is marked by a large American flag. My dad leaned into to say that westerners can’t help themselves from planting the American flag and be very exceptionalist.
With any media under the american hegemon its one way or the other going to peddling what the empire deems fit.
