What did we think

what did we think

The cryptology/ linguistics stuff was really good. Felt like 50s and 60s russian scifi stories.

Sadly it went to shit with the bullshit time travel/ seeing through time stuff. Created too many plotholes.
Also it really portrayed the physicist in a bad light. He didnt do jackshit the entire movie. He just acknowledged the amazing alien tech of antigravity and materials and didnt even bother experimenting with it.

my thoughts exactly

"universal language that lets you see into the future once you understand it" was a nice metaphor for mathematics. at least that's what i think they were going for.

also liked the mathematica product placement. apparently wolfram research did consulting work on the film.

Masters of space and time, can't figure out flapping meat sounds--that's Hollywood for you.

Do yourself a favour by reading this book instead, thanks to whoever recommended it to me on Veeky Forums.

I dunno I thought the time stuff was done well and the focus wasnt on the physicist

The aliens had no trouble at all understanding us

i thought the "if you understand their non linear language you can suddenly perceive time non linearly despite your human biology not changing" was so stupid it was insulting. Particularly because it WASN'T a metaphor, it was literal in the movie. Sure it might have been trying to say something to the audience but it still was stupid in the confines of the movie.

Slaughterhouse Five handled this way better, and they totally ripped it off.

The idea was that it physically changed the wiring of your brain

yeah but that it would change both alien and human alike in this specific way is still pretty out there

based on absolutely nothing Im going to take a wild guess and say youd need to do a little more than change the existing wiring of the human brain to suddenly have a human be able to perceive time non-linearly

If they had made a more obvious reason why she suddenly gained the ability--maybe some cut away of the doctor commenting on her brain patterns or waves or something--it might've made it a little less dumb, but I thought it was lacking as is in the movie

alright if we're trying to explain things within the movie logic here's my guess

the language induced patterns of neural firing that caused quantum resonance in the actin microfilaments in neurons causing some kind of warping that allowed data to transfer backwards through time

the language taught to the humans was not actually the same one that the aliens used to achieve this purpose, but instead was one carefully engineered by the aliens specifically for the human brain to create this effect

it's batshit insane but these guys had spaceships that could evaporate so it doesn't seem that out there

Well I assumed it was natural for the aliens, and that the effort of learning their language required/caused that shift in perception for humans

Science fiction works best in my opinion when it doesnt try to hard to explain its less realistic concepts

Any attempt to specifically explain what happened would be worse than what we got

science fiction does work best when it doesnt explain things like faster than light travel, but that only works when the thing that shouldn't be explained is simple enough and not super important to the fundamental plot of the movie. For example, in star wars, nobody tries to explain lightspeed, but nobody has to because you know the only function in the movie is to scoot around planets quickly and get to the next scene

but in this movie, this thing that cannot be explained because it can't exist is CENTRAL to the plot, so the audience is definitely going to nitpick the fuck out of it and realize it doesnt make any sense in the context of the world in the movie or of our world, and what's left is an experience that is robbed of its magic because the director and screenwriters were too lazy to think of a narrative that involved human emotions without resorting to having Amy Adams get time perception powers

>it's batshit insane but these guys had spaceships that could evaporate so it doesn't seem that out there

Did anyone get the sense that these aliens were interdimensional and not extraterrestrial? That would explain the spaceships disappearing - and their ability to see/experience time in a nonlinear fashion wouldn't it?

I mean, you'd have to exist outside of our dimension to perceive the dimension of time differently, wouldn't you? That's what my popsci books say.

yes

which is why amy adams getting their abilities is fucking stupid

Yeah that didn't make sense. But it was still a good movie.

>The idea was that it physically changed the wiring of your brain
Changed it into what? Soup?

>The aliens had no trouble at all understanding us
They understood us so well as to not answer anything.

>Science fiction works best in my opinion when it doesnt try to hard to explain its less realistic concepts

So, soft science fiction? (AKA Not real science fiction)

Into a different arrangement

The whole point was to teach us to speak their language. Not a lot of incentive for that if they speak in perfect english/chinese etc

There is no hard sci-fi, only degrees of softness

>The whole point was to teach us to speak their language. Not a lot of incentive for that if they speak in perfect english/chinese etc
So, the best way to teach Cthulhu would be?

What would non-linear time would actually be like? I always imagined 2-T as every temporally probable event happening simultaneously to and in parallel with the 1-T flow of time. A 2-T consciousneds would likely be extraordinarily more complex than us, they would likely be able to comprehend many permutation of time simultaneously, just as we can see the entirety of a circle or line from a 2-D plane. Maybe time isnt even a physical dimenson any more than vacuum is a physical dimenson, it could just be an emergent property of space and therefor does not follow the same principles as dimensonal analogy.

The movie was unrealistic from a linguistics perspective and idiotic in all other aspects of plot, especially the utterly one dimensional characters. It's actually almost an overstatement to call them one-dimensional, as they are really nothing more than mouthpieces for plot points in the most vapid possible sense.

Exactly the same as how they did it for humans?

amy adams is the only character, and her character is trash

i cannot understand how this has good reviews. probably the same way bioshock infinite got near 100s across the board

>I dunno I thought the time stuff was done well

The implications of being able to see all of time were vastly underplayed. There wouldnt have been a child in the future, and no ceremony with the chinese guy and all that.
If we could have acess to everything that we will ever be able to know, it wouldnt take us long to reach that point. Within a couple of years humanity would be at its peak!
The entire shit about her daughter was so random and wrong. Just to appeal to normies.

What the hell did they even mean by "non-linear"?? That time was somehow dependent on a variable exponentially?

Time was always a line. the only thing that changed was that everyone who spoke the language could see all of it at once.

instead of time being a line and you a moving point on it, it's like a big jello of moments that your consciousness zips around from place to place in

they said "they perceive all times at once," but that doesnt make sense for a 3rd dimensional being, which the heptapods had to have been for amy adams to have gotten her super powers

it really would have just been better if they were fourth dimensional beings that somehow through spoopy magic gave amy adams 4d powers, because as is it doesnt make a lick of sense

This book threw me off with this weird "ancestral vampire genes" stuff. Does it get better, or will there be more pulpy scifi down the line?

>implying perception of time allows you to change the future
>implying determinism is false
>implying the space squids didn't ride pilot waves to Earth as their ships clearly use reactionless drives
>implying the physicist did fucking anything the whole movie

pic related: physicists this month