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.
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.