Contact vs. The Arrival

Attack the Block, now that's a good alien movie, lol.

originally posted by: ghostryder21
i like

fire in the sky

I used to think nicely about alien intelligence visiting Earth. Then I saw Fire in the Sky ^

My fav is still Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Saw it as a 5 year old and felt related to the main character and have wanted to leave Earth ever since.

Contact was classic but had little or no message. Imagine receiving instrox to build only to build, get sabatoged by 'Christian' terrorists then build again and launch only to just have conversation by the beach with some dude that says he knows no more than you about anything?!
With Arrival, communication was by going up into a visiting submarine that appeared which houses octopi that communicate through ink squirts and traverse timespace.to warn Earthlings their help will be needed thousands of years in the future. Alas, given Hiro/Naga,9/11, Fuku, and current ME genocide, will humanity even last another millenia or 3?

"Arrival" with Charlie Sheen was pretty fun.
"Arrival" with Amy Adams got a little too esoteric.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
"Arrival" with Charlie Sheen was pretty fun.
"Arrival" with Amy Adams got a little too esoteric.

That low budget movie "Arrival" was one of the best ever in alien movies, better than Contact which was a huge Hollywood movie with big stars.

Contact was great too and more positive

a reply to: LooseLipsSinkShips

Contact is genuinely a perfectly executed movie. It is long because it has so much to explained in a short space of time, which is not a bad thing. It was written be carl sagan, so you know that its contents was as clear to scientific truth as it could be. Hence the reason its end execution is that of near perfection. The fact it covers humans views on our world, our hopes and dreams, religious ties to government and our ability to slow ourselves down and onto the vast future predictive possibilities of contact that outshines even movies of today. That, is why contact in my eyes is excellently played film.

Films like Arrival feel often like cheap knockoffs. Often trying to replicate films like contact but never do, due to over complication to try and be the next 'big' film but falls short.

a reply to: LooseLipsSinkShips



Paul.

www.imdb.com...

www.imdb.com...

a reply to: zaiger

Logged in if only to star this post.

I used to LOVE Contact, but I’m no longer the Carl Sagan fanboy I used to be. Didn’t he take Donald Menzel’s seat in MJ-12? Plus I think SETI, while pure intentioned, is on the wrong track. Best they’ll find is remnants of an ancient civilization, they’ll never actually make contact. That Seth guy they have in charge is a smug little prick too. They need to stop drawing attention to us. Listening g is great, just stop beaming out transmissions for what is obviously a publicity stunt. Maybe the book was better.

The Arrival is better, IMHO, if only because it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is: a summer blockbuster, and a pretty good one at that. The script is good, the CG is pretty awesome for the available tech, casting’s great, it’s shot well, and the story puts scientists into heroic roles. Like Indiana Jones. Contact is too preachy with its fundamentalist luddites, obstructionist government officials, and hypocritical scientists. The Arrival is just a fun movie.

I think Arrival with Amy Adams and Hawkeye is better than both of them, by a mile. The soundtrack alone is so unsettling, it really does a great job of communicating how whacked out, knot in your stomach, nutso first contact would be. I found it riveting, I know others didn’t, and not too heady at all. Just enough to make you watch it a couple times to get everything. Sweet movie.

Contact is more realistic imo.

Pretty sure a nearly identical situation has already occurred.

The difference is that nobody actually cares.

I stopped bothering with decoding the signal. The supportive evidence is just going to rot and die on a random email server.

How does anyone expect us to listen to an extraterrestrial broadcast? When we won't even listen to each other on Earth.

a reply to: Blue Shift

I always tell people that was Charlie Sheen's best acting.

It was like Fear and Loathing meets Alien Invasion.

Here are some I like, that I didn't see in this thread yet:
The McPherson Tapes - Original and the remake
Alien Abduction - The North Carolina mountains version
Communion - This should be a staple classic for anyone interested in the Abduction or visitation phenomena
The Signal - If you haven't seen The Signal, call off work today, stay home "sick" and watch it.


These are more scary type stuff. I'm into the adrenaline rush involved with imagining myself in the same situations as the characters.

It's quite a heart thumper to imagine making contact in a frightening way.

a reply to: LooseLipsSinkShips

Contact was great. Arrival and Arrival were good.

A great sleeper movie that didn't get much attention was DARK SKIES with Keri Russell.

I liked 'Contact', but I thought 'The Arrival' was a load of bollocks. For me 'Arrival' was the better film, because our language predicates the way we think, and the way we think is the cause of all our problems. Thus, to bring a form of relief to all our global anxieties, we need to understand each other's language, and not just be able to speak it.

a reply to: interupt42
Dark Skies was awesome.

Close Encounters was the best IMO. After that I would put Signs in second.

Contact was good but the idea that something with that great a scientific significance could get mired in religious hoopla kind of took away the luster.

The Arrival was fun to watch but it was a bit drawn out and didn't really finish with the finality it had been trying to build up to.

Oh, one more thing.

In the movie "Close encounters of the third kind"

The scene where they are coming out of the ship has interesting background audio. If you audio analyze that chunk of the movie, you can hear some of the film crew whispering to each other, while they are getting that scene. The conversation sounds like this:
"Did you know this really happened?"
"Bull#."
"It did, and the military was going to contribute their part of the story., but they pulled out of doing it at the last minute. The director said they showed him the tapes of the real event, but they were classified and they wouldn't provide the film."
"Wow."

originally posted by: Archivalist

In the movie "Close encounters of the third kind"

The scene where they are coming out of the ship has interesting background audio.

Really? I'll listen more closely next time.

So they were referencing Robert Emenegger's 1974 UFO documentary, 'UFOs: Past, Present, and Future', presented by Rod Serling. Legend has it that the USAF promised producer Emenegger that they would provide genuine footage of a real UFO landing and contact with personnel at Holloman Air Force Base in 1971 - a story infamous for its 'big-nosed' aliens! However, the promise was never fulfilled.

As many on ATS will know, the documentary allegedly included a few seconds of that USAF footage, showing a real UFO coming in to land...

I'm a big fan of the genre (surprise) and like Contact, Arrival (Amy Adams) and The Arrival (Charlie Sheen). I enjoyed Arrival more after my wife explained to me what I'd just watched. ~haha

Another one I'm a big fan of that I don't see discussed much is The Fourth Kind. It's got the 'real' footage interspersed with the movie footage, giving it an authentic feel. Very creepy.

Have to agree with most of you, Contact was garbage. No message, lame antagonists, and some worm portal to far away galaxies.

The Arrival was much more interesting. Aliens had an agenda, could blend in, etc.

They Live is on the top of the list for me.

My opinions are definitely skewed though as I don't believe there are alien life forms millions of galaxies away. There's nothing out there. Any "aliens" we see have either been here on Earth much longer than we have or live on a different plane (dimension) than we do.

Contact had a terrible ending that didn't make any sense.

Aliens give us clues to make a machine so that we can contact them. But when we build it and use it, nobody believes that we used it and the message they give the person using it is just like all the fake physics out there. "Your loved ones are fine, the afterlife is real and they want you to know they love you."

End of story.

Aliens made us spend Billions of dollars to make us make a machine, when they could have just sent that message in the original signal.

I don't get it. How does that help humanity or them. What is the point? Besides those that died, the only person affected and motivated and inspired by all of this was Jodi Foster. And what does she do, the same thing she did before...wait. For...nothing.

I have watched Contact about 10 times after reading the book. I saw Arrival once and that was 1 time too much.