Regarding the review of Arrival, a reader writes:
It was good but I was disappointed in the flaws, many of which could have been easily avoided. There was too much “confuse the audience for the sake of confusing them” for one. There should have been one scene showing at least the father’s back, to show that he had been present for the girl’s childhood. Instead, it made him look like a complete jerk for the entire movie, only to insist you believe otherwise at the very end. My understanding is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is fairly discredited now. It’s novel on first discovering it, and seems to explain many things. But apparently it’s not how humans really work. We liked that the lead was portrayed like a fairly ordinary woman.
There was some deliberately introduced confusion, but attempting to show how the flow of time is running through her mind isn’t an easy task. More importantly, though, the complaint about the portrayal of the father brings into sharp focus my central disturbance concerning the movie: that could have all been avoided just by telling the father that he was going to be disappointed in her because she foresaw her child’s early death and went ahead. This is all stuff that could have been avoided by a little conversation – but if you have that conversation then the future is disturbed, and so you don’t see it, ad infinitum. My credulity ligaments begin to snap.
And the lead was an ordinary woman?! The leading linguist in the world? Whose predecessor was carted off to the insane asylum?
