I’ll get to John Mearsheimer later, but for now, I must warn you:
Arrival was possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life. It got good reviews from the critical cabal—as if you needed more proof that “critics” are part of the Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bought and paid for shills.
I rarely regret seeing a movie, even a bad one, but there’s a first time for everything, and I regret wasting X minutes of my life (I don’t have the heart to look up how many minutes because that would also be a waste) on this DRECK.
It was utterly devoid of intellect, stupidly jingoistic (guess who come off the worst? the Chinese and the Russians!), overflowed with every juvenile movie cliché imaginable, down to the whiteboard scrawled with impenetrable mathematical formulae (yawn!). 1
The director couldn’t even set up a shot, much less describe the grand arc of the story. Near the beginning, an army colonel shows up at the central character’s home (or office, I can’t remember) — no set up shot, getting off a helicopter, etc. It’s as if he enters the scene by teleportation. Without introducing himself to her (and us) he orders the character, a prominent linguist, to get her shit together in “10 minutes” to talk with the aliens.
That really rings true to life.
If I had known that the director was the same hack who made Sicario, I’d have passed. Sicario had an interesting premise, but it was ruined by a variety of bad directorial choices. First, casting Emily Blunt in a role that would have been played by Van Heflin in the 1950s.
Granted, it’s not the director’s fault that he had to give into the zeitgeist and cast a woman in a part that should have been played by a man. It was his fault that he didn’t make ANY changes to acknowledge that. Nope, he went full equal-tard and portrayed this as if there were no differences between men and women.
I don’t remember much of the movie, because it was shit, but I do remember that Blunt, a woman of fragile, ballerina-like loveliness, got knocked around a lot. The effect was painful and almost pornographic. Sorry not sorry, but when you see a tough guy get knocked around onscreen, it’s OK. It’s all part of the game, like football. Guy’s gonna get knocked down and dirtied up.
When you see a ballerina get stomped, it’s not OK.
The interactions of the characters were false and left a sour taste in my mouth.
There was a scene where Blunt changes her shirt in front of her cop buddy, played by a black actor. I cringed. No woman would do this in real life unless she intended to go to bed with the guy. This buddy-buddy behavior is simply NOT TRUE TO LIFE in that the character was meant to be sensitive and intelligent and caring and all those good, heroic things.
But no woman who is all those good things would do something like that. Because taking your shirt off in front of a man as if it’s no big deal is emasculating. When women do things that evoke a biologically masculine response (in this case, a sexual response, but it could be protective) and behave as if nothing had happened (psychologists call this “extinguishing behavior”), the effect on the man is emasculation.
That the actor playing her buddy was black made the scene even more cringeworthy. Do I have to explain why? I suppose I do:
A white woman casually emasculated a black man onscreen.
DOUBLE CRINGE.
The film industry is a prime example of the collapse of American civilization. From Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane to Arrival in 77 years. (And scores of pretty good movies in between.)
Where will we be at 100? I shudder to think.
(When the main characters confront the squids through a plexiglass window, I thought of this.)
For a handy compendium of all that was wrong with it, see this. But don’t even bother if you value your time. Just know that someone did take the time to point out every flaw in this crapola movie.
*dreck* is the perfect word for this one. Effluent would work too but dreck has the Yiddish zing - unachievable in English