328: Panspermia, but for Clothes

The Incomparable Mothership

Jason Snell

Arts, Tv & Film, Leisure

4.8 • 694 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2016

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We deconstruct and reconstruct the recent release “Arrival,” staring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, and based on a story by Ted Chiang that we discussed nearly 300 episodes ago. There’s praise for the story’s restraint, quiet tone, beautiful scenes of solitary obelisks in remote cow pastures, and realistic portrayal of its main characters. We also enter a spirited debate about the film’s sci-fi plot mechanism, the way its aliens (and alien language) are portrayed, and the morality of a choice that one character may—or may not—have made.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Incomparable, number 328, November 2016.
0:10.9	Welcome back everybody to The Incomparable.
0:12.9	I'm your host, Jason Snell.
0:14.3	We are going to do an unusual thing, semi-unusual thing for The Incomparable,
0:18.3	which is talk about a movie that is in theaters now as we
0:21.0	record this. It is November 2016. And a film released in this very month is on our agenda. We are
0:30.2	going to talk about arrival directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, along with Forrest Whitaker and some other interesting people.
0:42.0	Based on the Ted Chang story, Story of Your Life, which I should look up, we discussed it.
0:50.1	That story and his entire collection in an early episode in an early episode of the incomparable episode number
0:56.6	22. Nope, 32. You can go back to number 32 and hear past us talk about that. Uh, joining me
1:05.4	to talk about arrival are these three lovely people. Aline Sims, hello. Hello. It's good to have you here. Thank you. I'm
1:13.7	excited to talk about this amazing movie I loved. Spoilers. John Syracusa is also here, is, was,
1:21.5	will be something like that. Hi, John. Yeah, it kind of seems like I've always been here, and yet I haven't
1:26.5	arrived yet.
1:36.0	Glenn Fleischman was joining us and always joins us. Hi, Glenn. Hi, I can't tell you how hard it was when we were talking about the stories a few years ago to not mention this episode, but I did it. I pulled
1:40.3	it off. That's good. That's good. Heptopod B. And of course, I don't know why, of course.
1:45.7	He saw the movie and wanted to talk about it.
1:47.5	It's Joe Steele.
1:48.1	Hi, Joe.
1:49.0	Hello.
1:49.8	You were one of the motivators for me to finally pull the trigger on this because you're like,
1:54.5	I have things I would like to say.
	...

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