MovieChat Forums > SirMildredPierce
SirMildredPierce (25)
Posts
Replies
So you are saying we should only account for the things we know when visiting an unknown environment like an alien spaceship.
Meh, I find her features a little too sharp, I actually think Lopez is the more attractive one.
But what about Lopez? What about Office Lopez?!? Will she survive?!
> Emmet is an asshole. Not in any remarkable special way... just in the average mundane way that most people are. If you cheat someone out their birthright... you just hand it to them and say sorry I took it... you don't say I'm giving it to you.
What?? No way, it was *Ray's* idea to trade the stamps and the Corvette. Just because Emmit made a bit of money off the stamps down the road doesn't make him an asshole. Damn, what you been drinkin' Nikki's Kool-Aid, too?
I agree, I was actually confused as to how or why the alien was killed because the partition was still intact. I literally loved everything else about this movie, but that one scene and chain of events didn't really make much sense.
I think overall the whole "fog" motif is a pretty easy way to introduce a bit of mystery (which is why it's such an easy trope to use with "evil" creatures), but I like how it actually worked to subvert our expectations of the aliens, too. It was also a little bit of lampshading about other alien "invasion" movies, although this is hardly as obvious an example as when the Alien ships were preparing to leave and their crafts manouvered in to a horizontal position that made them look just like the ships from movies like Independence Day.
I'll be honest, I was around when the movie came out, and it seemed like it was set way further in the past than season 1 and 3 are. Yeah, 2010 seems like last year to me too ;)
> The idea in the movie is that you can manipulate the physics of the universe just by thinking. This is called "magic" not science.
Well, in the realm of "sci-fi" you have a pretty wide spectrum. This is hardly the first science-fiction to explore the idea of non-linear time. You would literally have to dismiss every time travel movie made as "not being sci-fi" just because it deals with non-linear time.
I don't even believe that the movie implies that you can "manipulate the physics of the universe just by thinking". I don't think just because she existed in non-linear time that is the same thing as her being able to change the future. We don't even know is she *can* change the future. The concept of a "future" simply doesn't exist anymore.
> Learning a language can change how you think but it can not change how your brain functions.
What's the difference, really?
I would explore the concepts of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the concept of how language effects our perception of time is central to the hypothesis (and the movie, obviously).
For me this was a movie about linguistics, first, and a sci-fi movie second. You could have made a pretty similar movie about an isolated tribe of people in the middle of the Amazon and trying to decipher *their* language.
If you are dismissing the movie as "pure fantasy" then you are being way too limited on your definition of "sci-fi" which is a *very* broad category. The movie doesn't fail as sci-fi just because you disagree about how physics work, especially when so much of higher level physics deals *specifically* with models of time that aren't linear.
Even if you want to come up with some hairbrained definition of "sci-fi" that the movie has to have some sort of real science in it, the movie still succeeds in that about 50% of the movie focuses on the science of linguistics. Just because that's a science that sci-fi doesn't explore very often doesn't make it not sci-fi.
Yes dumb people are famous for their love of indepth analysises of language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I can't believe it took them this long to make a movie about linguistics.
Without a doubt its the most in-depth movie about linguistics I've ever seen. And not only is it in-depth about linguistics in general, but specifically about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis which is about the nature of how language is responsible for how we perceive the world around us, and those who learn different languages perceive the world around them. The concept of how time is perceived by different cultures is one of the big central questions in the hypothesis. Without a doubt it is one of the concepts that has generated the most controversy about the hypothesis. There are languages out there which do not make distinctions about grammatical tense. It is one of the great questions in linguistics, how does the brain of a person who grew up not making a distinction about the past present or future differ from someone who grew up always thinking of things in terms of past present and future. And how does that 'innate understanding' effect how they perceive other things in this world?
Because so much of our world is colored by the languages we grow up speaking, the different concepts on linear and nonlinear time are explored heavily in areas outside of linguistics.The circular and non-linear nature of time is something touched upon in Eastern philosophy and religion, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. That was the sort of vibe that I got from the movie. The literal ability to see into the future is a metaphorical gift of accepting the true nature of life.
Without a doubt there is no great big leap in exploring non-linear time within the context of an alien language, the only real obvious leap is making the implication that this would allow someone to see the future. I kind of saw the Universal Language as allowing a sentient being to unlock an already innate ability, as opposed to the language somehow instilling the ability itself. I don't really have a big problem with that part, theres nothing wrong with a little science fiction in our science fiction.
View all replies >