I saw it years ago (but not when it came out) and I think I enjoyed it good enough but I think I had some of the complaints people stated in here, namely I was looking for a deep dive movie on what first contact would be like and it isn't that type of movie.

I also thought it was somewhat hokey in an interstellar type of way thinking it was one of those sci-fi movies where the main theme is love conquers sciences. I thought the story of Louise Family Life was too narrow a focus of a film about First Contact.

I rewatched it recently and it was one of those rewatches where I kinda of mostly forgotten what the story was about and every scene was familiar but I was still captivated like I was watching it for the first time. And I was in a sense because my focus this time was totally different. This time I totally got caught up with the idea of The "tool/weapon" of the Aliens language. To me that's the most interesting aspect of the movie. The idea that if we had the ability to experience time in a non-linear fashion, it could lead the way to all sorts of breakthroughs including something like world peace (which I think the movie was suggesting was the direction earth was going, from the brink of war to international cooperation because we now have the ability to stop seeing everything as a zero sum competition and finally see the bigger picture.

Looking at the movie this way, it no longer seemed like a small narrow scoped movie but a movie with a broad global message.

I don't know, it just hit differently watching it again. Something that I am finding happens a lot on rewatches of Denis Villeneuve movies. In the past few months I rewatched the Prisonor, Sicaro and Arrival and I think on first pass I thought they were all well made genre movies on second watching I see a lot more is going on in the films. Denis Villeneuve is somebody who I have seen many of his films without knowing the director by name to becoming one of my top 5 working directors simply by rewatching his films. Dude is a slow burn director in a time when everything else seems surface deep and based on speed.


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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"