I just got back from seeing it and wow, was it ever amazing.
The Sphere-esque mold for a film is an excellent vehicle to dive into actually cool ideas and visuals. Arrival sort of did this recently but was not nearly as open-ended as this.
The only real cons I have with the film are its a little too character-focused, and the mystery of The Shimmer is more or less explained.
In fact, a lot of the mystery is explained. From what I understand (having not read the books), the shimmer is essentially a way of collapsing everything around it into a kind of hive mind organism? I say a kind of hive mind organism because it appears as all the living things also have a certain degree of agency. Sort of like a less violent version of The Thing? On this note, I also didn't need one of the characters to explain why the bear sounded like their deceased team member. That whole sequence was so amazing and one of the best sequences of horror for me since probably The Blair Witch Project. However, the energy of that scene gets kind of diluted when a hokey explanation of her consciousness at death being transferred to the bear gets revealed. I didn't need to know that.
I really appreciated how all the character deaths involved becoming part of their environment in some way, however this is sort of a good thing and bad thing. Whether it has intent or not is sort of irrelevant because none of it acted with any real purpose.
There was also a little too much character focus. Her cheating on her husband; all the women having some kind of damaged past...Im glad it didn't delve into these things further because they are the least interesting aspects of the film. Characters in sci-fi and horror should be HUDS for ideas and visuals and nothing more, in my opinion. As such, the final moment of it ending with the relationship of Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac felt a little weird. We know the identity of Isaac, and had it been just implied with the whole sequence with the phosphorous grenade, it would have been 100 times better. And the questions it poses about death and/or annihilation being simply a new form of existence felt kind of hastily thought out. I didn't need it. Especially symbolized within this boring relationship between Portman and Isaac.
Regardless, since none of my friends have seen this, im super interested to read what you guys thought about it and to illuminate the film further. Im certainly missing some points, but this film is worth talking about.
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