The Chinese come to the rescue of NASA and the movie literally concludes with one of the American heroes fist-bumping a Chinese astronaut on a joint mission back to Mars. It's a sad reminder of how bad the new cold war has become in just a few years.
2015: :wholesome: We can explore space together! :solidarity:
2022: President Xi is going to invade Taiwan at any moment LAUNCH THE NUKES NOW! :guts-rage:
:sadness:
For an example of a film portraying the exact opposite, see Arrival (2016), where the EVIL TRIGGER HAPPY CHINESE are shown as being quick to suspicion, hawkish, unreasonable, and uncompromising. Also a scene involving Forest Whitaker that I personally find rather ick
Every time Americans try to criticize China, they just describe themselves
When they revealed that
:posadist-nuke:
the Chinese translated the aliens' message as "use weapon" instead of the "bring tool / weapon" interpretation the Americans came up with
my first thought was "in reality, this would be exactly reversed."
To be fair to that film, the US were full of far-right terrorists trying to blow up the aliens, and it was actually the Chinese general hearing his own dying wife's words read back to him that brought about the cooperation.
That said, yes, they are depicted as all those other things during all the rest of the movie
The American military was depicted that way as well.
That really took me out of the movie. I’m sure it’s in the book as well, but no military on earth would be itching to fight aliens. That’s ridiculous.
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There's not really any of the military shit in the original story. It's a short story and much leaner.
Also amy adams cant speak chinese
what's the forest scene that's ick?
I struggle to remember every detail, but, Forest Whitaker plays an american Colonel(?), and explains why it might be preferable to attack and kill the aliens totally unprovoked by explaining through analogy how the landing of the american colonists "didn't work out so well for the indians", and not a wink of irony all throughout.