Spoilers for the movie, obviously.
How dare the US pretend like they would be the peaceful nation and that China would be belligerent the entire time. Don't get me wrong, it didn't stop me from enjoying the movie. The atmosphere, setting, plot, editing. Everything was so fantastic. The aliens, the themes about language and culture.
And I know that it was a US made movie with US main characters, but everytime they mentioned China being hostile felt so cringe. I doubt Villanueve was being intentionally anti-China, he just needed a non US ally to be belligerent so the protagonists would have a clock to race against. But even having Russia in that role would make more sense. And even weirder that China was ruled by a general from the People's Liberation Army.
Now this isn't me coming from a "China would never do anything bad" perspective. It's just silly pretending that the US wouldn't immediately send sidewinder missiles into that thing before it landed. The US would shoot first, second, and third before thinking to ask questions. The Chinese weather balloon tells us all we need to know about that. Now for the sake of the movie I was willing to accept the premise, but when it became all of the non West countries acting hostile it stung with me.
I think I'm only ranting because it was such a good movie and the whole theme of language being the key to understanding culture was undermined by making China the Bad Guys. If this was a shlockier, worse movie I wouldn't care to complain about that detail. I haven't read the original short story, but I'm sure that it didn't have this element.
Potentially unpopular opinion: I hated it.
spoiler
Time travel as a premise sucks because it violates causality and thereby robs all the characters of agency. People don't make choices and solve problems, they follow a foreordained path that was cut out for them, and it results in an incredibly contrived and ultimately uninteresting plot.
For example, the way she chooses to have the child is billed as a big character moment because she knows it's going to lead to personal tragedy, but it's not really a choice, it's something that has to happen for the plot to make sense. If she chooses not to have the kid, then the heptapods' language is nondeterministic (it doesn't reveal the future, it reveals a future), and, given that you don't know what choices other people are going to make, your predictions become worthless. Yet the heptapods were able to see the fact that they'll need human assistance in the ludicrously deep future with enough confidence that they're willing to put together the mission, which implies that the universe is essentially deterministic and we're all God's little finger puppets or physics objects. Which could be true for us irl but the plot tries to pretend that free will is still somehow meaningful. It's the most frustrating sort of fiction and it feels like the mental equivalent of chewing on aluminum foil to me.
That's a fair critique. I generally agree about time travel being too funky to make sense and there sure are a lot of implications about free will and determinism that come from it. But that didn't take away from the fantastic direction and visual language of the film. I really enjoyed how we got to the ending even if the ending isn't perfect.
It was visually impressive for sure! And I do dig the first-contact-figuring-out-how-the-aliens-communicate subgenre. I think my favorite is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell - have you ever read it?
I've never. I need to read more sci Fi so I'll check it out.
If you haven't already, if you like first contact with weird aliens, try Blindsight by Peter Watts. Really cool themes concerning consciousness
I actually just read Blindsight and Echopraxia recently after seeing a recommendation on here, haha. I liked Blindsight better from a storytelling perspective but I thought they were both good reads.
This is probably the first time I've read a negative opinion about this movie as a whole.
negativity
As I was watching, I couldn't fathom how that was supposed to be "amazing", "incredible" etc. It felt so empty and it pretended to be way deeper than it actually was, i.e. presenting shallow ideas and emotions dressed in that infamous "art film" aesthetic. Other than the alien scenes, the whole movie felt the same as all other generic military propaganda movies