# Arrival [November 11]



## Sennin of Hardwork (Aug 16, 2016)

> When mysterious spacecrafts touch down across the globe, an elite team - lead by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) - is brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers – and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity.



I liked Denis Villenueve's Prisoners a few years ago and this one seems to be as good as that one. 

12 posters have also been released showing the locations where these ships arrive on Earth.


*Spoiler*: __ 




*Montana, USA*

*Black Sea, Russia

United Kingdom

Hokkaido, Japan

Indian Ocean*

*Sierra Leone*

*Sudan*

*Greenland*

*Venezuela

Pakistan

Shanghai, China*

*Siberia, Russia*


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## Krory (Aug 16, 2016)

So many posters and they all look dumb as fuck.

Reactions: Agree 1


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## Rukia (Aug 16, 2016)

The posters are stupid.  The trailer looked solid though.  I will watch it.


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## Swarmy (Aug 17, 2016)

Saw the trailer some days ago and almost flipped the table when they didn't show the aliens


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## Swarmy (Aug 17, 2016)

Oh wait they show a tentacle in this trailer  Well at least they won't be humanoid aliens


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## Jake CENA (Aug 17, 2016)

I hate Amy Adams. I cannot take her seriously after watching MoS and BvS.

Reactions: Disagree 2


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## Jake CENA (Aug 17, 2016)

Prisoners and Sicario were epic tho

Reactions: Agree 2


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## Swarmy (Aug 17, 2016)

TerminaTHOR said:


> Prisoners and Sicario were epic tho



Sicario was precious so I have my high hopes for this one


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## Rukia (Aug 17, 2016)

TerminaTHOR said:


> Prisoners and Sicario were epic tho


Enemy.


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## Swarmy (Nov 11, 2016)

I'm seeing this in 4 hours


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## Roman (Nov 11, 2016)

Gonna watch this tmo I think


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## Swarmy (Nov 11, 2016)

Ok saw it! And honestly this is by far the best movie of the year so far!  It's smart, stylish and complex. Also applause for making the aliens so well... alien 

I think this should be in the top 10 sci-fi movies of all time.

Reactions: Agree 2


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## Stunna (Nov 11, 2016)

*Spoiler*: _the phone call translated_ 



"War does not make winners, only widows."

Reactions: Like 2


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## RAGING BONER (Nov 11, 2016)

real talk...do we kick the aliens assess or not?


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## Stunna (Nov 11, 2016)

RAGING BONER said:


> real talk...do we kick the aliens assess or not?



*Spoiler*: __ 



the aliens didn't come to fight, and violence is avoided

Reactions: Optimistic 1


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## Jake CENA (Nov 12, 2016)

its a boring piece of shit movie

Reactions: Disagree 3 | Dislike 3


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## Stunna (Nov 12, 2016)

Spoken like a true pleb smh


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## Swarmy (Nov 12, 2016)

Stunna said:


> *Spoiler*: _the phone call translated_
> 
> 
> 
> "War does not make winners, only widows."



Thanks! I was really curious what it was 



TerminaTHOR said:


> its a boring piece of shit movie



Usually I ignore such statements but in this case you are so wrong that it hurts me physically

Reactions: Agree 1


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## Uncle Acid (Nov 12, 2016)

I like Denis Villeneuve and I think Forest Whitaker is one of the most underrated actors alive today. He's done a lot of shit over the years, but his performance in the beyond excellent Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells you what he's capable of with a good script.

I love me some Tzi Ma as well.

Think this film looks neat as hell. Looking forward to it a lot.


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## Swarmy (Nov 12, 2016)

*Spoiler*: _One thing I didn't quite get_ 



Why did they land all over the world if they needed just her?


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## Stunna (Nov 12, 2016)

Swarmy said:


> *Spoiler*: _One thing I didn't quite get_
> 
> 
> 
> Why did they land all over the world if they needed just her?



*Spoiler*: __ 



iirc, they didn't know Amy Adams was the one "destined" to help them? They were scouting for the right linguists all over, and she just happened to fit the bill.

Reactions: Informative 1


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## Swarmy (Nov 12, 2016)

Stunna said:


> *Spoiler*: __
> 
> 
> 
> iirc, they didn't know Amy Adams was the one "destined" to help them? They were scouting for the right linguists all over, and she just happened to fit the bill.



Ah that makes sense actually


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## Linkdarkside (Nov 12, 2016)




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## Jake CENA (Nov 12, 2016)

this is the first time that i would have to disagree with Angry Joe. probably the 2nd time. since he liked No Man's Sky


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## Jake CENA (Nov 12, 2016)

no matter what i do, i kept on seeing a fat Loise Lane on the screen with shit ass acting


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## Stunna (Nov 13, 2016)

>fat
>shit acting

troll pls go


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## Jake CENA (Nov 13, 2016)

she's borderline the new J.Lawrence. 

i really cant unsee her performance in BvS. thats a total hot pile of garbage in itself. her presence only made it worse. as if Lex ^ (not the meaning of the word "respect".) wasnt enough for fucks sake.

Reactions: Dislike 1


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## reiatsuflow (Nov 13, 2016)

I was disappointed. The movie staged some great scenes, but it probably worked stronger as a short story. Once I realized what the movie was actually about, it went downhill. The development wasn't as bad as I was expecting - the narration at the opening made me alert for a twist - but the development was still somewhere aside the rest of the movie, and incongruous. Some of that might have to do with just how visually arresting the alien encounters were, and in a way they might not have felt in a short story, which makes the shift away from that disappointing cinematically. I was so engaged in the language back and forth that when the syrupy pseudo spiritual core was revealed, I was like, _Goddammit movie._

It reminds me of why some people complained about interstellar, which I thought did the 'supernatural' (or at least spiritually scientific) development into an otherwise straight-faced movie more convincingly and movingly. Arrival's version was well acted, edited and shot, but otherwise unconvincing and unmoving. But the first half is great stuff, and they staged those alien encounters so well.

Reactions: Agree 1


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## Stunna (Nov 13, 2016)

I've seen the comparison a lot, and I sympathize with it, but I think _Arrival's _twist worked much, much better than _Interstellar's._


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## Six (Nov 14, 2016)

This movie was so damn good. I haven't seen a movie this good since Prisoners. This might be my favorite movie.

Reactions: Agree 1


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## Six (Nov 14, 2016)

TerminaTHOR said:


> no matter what i do, i kept on seeing a fat Loise Lane on the screen with shit ass acting


Go troll somewhere else. This movie deserves an Oscar nod for best movie. And the acting and cinematography were unreal. The only thing that pissed me off about this movie is that my gf and I snuck in to see it without paying because this is definitely worth any price your theater charges you.


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## Mider T (Nov 16, 2016)

I liked Sicario and this had a similar feel, large panorama scenes with eerily quiet mins where you think they'll be a loud shocking noise.  Never heard of Prisoners though.

One thing is killing me though 
*Spoiler*: __ 



What happens in 3,000 years?!


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## Six (Nov 17, 2016)

Mider T said:


> I liked Sicario and this had a similar feel, large panorama scenes with eerily quiet mins where you think they'll be a loud shocking noise.  Never heard of Prisoners though.
> 
> One thing is killing me though
> *Spoiler*: __
> ...


That was 3000 years before Trump got elected.

Reactions: Like 2


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## Lucaniel (Nov 20, 2016)

Stunna said:


> *Spoiler*: __
> 
> 
> 
> iirc, they didn't know Amy Adams was the one "destined" to help them? They were scouting for the right linguists all over, and she just happened to fit the bill.


doesn't that contradict their 
*Spoiler*: __ 



temporal omniscience


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## Stunna (Nov 20, 2016)




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## reiatsuflow (Nov 20, 2016)

Lucaniel said:


> doesn't that contradict their
> *Spoiler*: __
> 
> 
> ...



I haven't read the short story the movie was based on, but it seems like the international crisis, chinese subplot and the aliens being stationed at various points in the world were original to the movie. So it's probably a little outside of the established rules.


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## Nighty the Mighty (Nov 29, 2016)

reiatsuflow said:


> It reminds me of why some people complained about interstellar, which I thought did the 'supernatural' (or at least spiritually scientific) development into an otherwise straight-faced movie more convincingly and movingly.



holy shit I've never seen a more wrong opinion in my life and this post:



TerminaTHOR said:


> its a boring piece of shit movie



is also in this thread



Swarmy said:


> *Spoiler*: _One thing I didn't quite get_
> 
> 
> 
> Why did they land all over the world if they needed just her?




*Spoiler*: __ 



It wasn't about her at all lol, the entire point of the movie is that communication is key.

The plot is in essence a closed temporal loop:

1. The aliens help us
2. 3000 years pass
3. We help them

The idea being conveyed was that humanity needed to unite and work together as a species, i.e. communicate, the reason there's 12 space ships all around the world is to catalyse this unification.

Reactions: Like 1


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## Jake CENA (Nov 29, 2016)

aliens are overrated. in fact, they are the inferior species. it just so happens that they have a fairly advance airplane that can travel through space


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## reiatsuflow (Nov 29, 2016)

Nighty the Mighty said:


> holy shit I've never seen a more wrong opinion in my life



You get some benefit of the doubt because you've apparently watched birdy the mighty, but the idea of language being able to fundamentally shift a person's observance of time into nonlinearity and allow them to see future is just as out-there as love being able to supersede space and time based on how we can love someone who is no longer present or near. These are not necessarily plausible ideas, and they're both put into movies that otherwise purport an above average amount of plausibility with their sets, physics, math and ideas.

Reactions: Like 1 | Agree 2 | Funny 1


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## Nighty the Mighty (Nov 29, 2016)

reiatsuflow said:


> You get some benefit of the doubt because you've apparently watched birdy the mighty, but the idea of language being able to fundamentally shift a person's observance of time into nonlinearity and allow them to see future is just as out-there as love being able to supersede space and time based on how we can love someone who is no longer present or near. These are not necessarily plausible ideas, and they're both put into movies that otherwise purport an above average amount of plausibility with their sets, physics, math and ideas.



Science Fiction is necessarily based on the idea that some of what we know about science is wrong or can be bent. Even in Hard Sci-Fi rules get broken, e.g. Faster than Light travel is a common idea which we know to be pretty fundamentally impossible, it's a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe in fact, but it's the most common thing to get tossed aside in the genre because it's by far one of the biggest limiting factors we know of. Now, there are semi-plausible ways around this, Arrival has a technobabble physics equation for it that gets mentioned in a one off line by Ian (people actually believe this kind of thing might be true irl) while Interstellar has a Wormhole that leads to another solar system (same as arrival, there are people who believe this and people who don't, this kind of physics isn't 'solved' yet).

Yet the scale of Interstellar is so ginormous that it has to sacrifice far more realism and plausibility than Arrival ever does. At it's core we've got basically two concepts in Arrival that are breaking the rules and some minor ones that crop up outside of that.

1. The Perception of time.
2. The Aliens arriving on earth.
3. the gravity tunnel thing

Neither of these is at the moment truly plausible in a scientific sense but that's not the point of sci-fi, the point of sci-fi is to ask us questions about ourselves and our response to new things. Arrival is true classical sci-fi, it's a slow moving methodical piece which explores the consequences of first contact and the emotional element of how a human might really react to their perception of time being challenged (for instance, it breaks up Louise and Ian when she tells him that their daughter will die). If you ignore everything related to the science, this is a movie about a woman translating things nobody understands at all, the main thrust of the movie is this, everything from the plot to the core theme relates back to this idea.

Meanwhile in interstellar:

1. Wormholes exist and are stable enough to travel through
2. One exists in our solar system without fucking it up
3. It leads to another solar system and not a random patch of deep space
4. That solar system just so happens to have some planets capable of harbouring life
5. That solar system orbits a black hole
6. Landing on a planet somehow dilates time to a ridiculous extent
7. giant waves
8. There's some kind of theory of gravity which enables getting off the earth much easier
9. Escaping the pull of a Black Hole that close to it in a damaged ship
10. surviving entry into a Black Hole
11. the inside of a black hole looking like that
12. the inside of a black hole behaving like that
13. transmitting information backwards through time and out of a black hole
14. being inside a black hole somehow letting TARS compute the entirety of a theory of gravity which humans have been working on for upwards of 60 years in seconds
15. coop getting uplifted by aliens from the future back to his own solar system

At it's core, interstellar is a dumb movie made for dumb people to feel smart about. It's an action drama movie masquerading as a science fiction film, you watch it to see the imaginative visuals and for Nolan's emotional direction (despite interstellar being everything I hate about modern science fiction analysis, the scene where coop watches his video mails is pretty cool imo). I actually don't even really give a shit about the whole "love supersedes spacetime" angle that Brand brings up because it's obviously not intended to be taken as literal gospel.

Remember that time in arrival where one of the scientists went rogue and blew up the space ship and we then engage in a four minute long scene where the pilot has to manually navigate the shuttle to dock with the now out of control space ship and the whole thing is set to heavy organs? Or how about that time when they were falling into a black hole and one of them had to jettison off and fall into the black hole on his own to save the mission except it actually turns out that falling into a black hole is basically just a minor inconvenience and he needed to be there to fix the plot anyway?

Strip Interstellar of all of its science and what you're left with is a drama movie about a man who has to leave his children behind to go on a long voyage for the betterment of us all, the movie is about the astounding things he sees on his voyage, action sequences on his voyage, and the emotional tangle he and specifically his daughter feel in relation to each other. The core theme of the movie is something something love something something important emotions something.

I don't hate interstellar with a passion anymore but jesus christ, it should be illegal to be this wrong.


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## Lucaniel (Nov 29, 2016)

frankly i wasn't completely sold on the mechanics of arrival's twist but it is a shit-ton less stupid than interstellar both in details and _especially_ in execution

even if you're thick enough to be happy with "future 4th dimensional humans saved us" as an explanation (blatant DEM but whatever), if you don't spit out your popcorn at the ridiculous spectacle of matthew mcconaughey going inside a black hole only to discover that he's trapped behind a fucking bookcase, then you have the mind of a child

Reactions: Like 1 | Agree 1


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## reiatsuflow (Nov 29, 2016)

I saw interstellar once in theaters two years ago, so I'm going to wade out of my depth here pretty quickly. I'm stuck backtracking to just enjoying the experience of interstellar more than arrival, even though both movies jostled me when they developed into their spirituality. There's only so far I can elaborate and legitimatize myself there.



> this is a movie about a woman translating things nobody understands at all, the main thrust of the movie is this, everything from the plot to the core theme relates back to this idea.



That's a better frame than I had.

And the short frames all of this better than the movie did too. Something about visualizing these ideas endangers the experience. Visuals can imagine things in such a literal way that concepts become jarring. Visualizing the experience of nonlinear past/present/future makes it feel more jarring and unbelievable than writing it out in prose, where past tense / present tense / future tense writing expresses things in a fluid way that lets the imagination fill in enough space so it doesn't seem that a character is literally seeing into the future because of a new nonlinear language. In the short, the linearity of events swirls into past/present/future tense writing.

As a film, Arrival begins somewhere most movies don't, but concludes where a lot of other movies conclude. To me, the sentimentality about how life is worth living even with the hardship, and how she would choose to do it all over again if she had a choice, and all of that voiceover is something so familiar that it would have been no less disappointing if the movie concluded with an action packed military defense against suddenly-hostile aliens. I've seen these conclusions. For half the runtime I thought Arrival was going somewhere new, and then it went somewhere familiar, and ended up feeling like pablum because it wasn't really an emotionally engaging movie to begin with, so ending on an emotional note didn't resonate.

This is also where the short succeeds, even though they're more or less the same story. In the short, the conclusion is less about pablum and more about the philosophy and physics of nonlinearity, of predestination and other heady stuff. The movie either didn't have the time or the medium to communicate that, so I was suddenly watching a Lifetime collage in an otherwise interesting scifi movie.

But the frame you gave me about the entire movie following this woman trying to translate things nobody understands incorporates the development into the rest of the movie better.


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## Dragon D. Luffy (Dec 4, 2016)

Mider T said:


> One thing is killing me though
> *Spoiler*: __
> 
> 
> ...



Spiral Nemesis.


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## Dragon D. Luffy (Dec 4, 2016)

Saw it. Probably best film of the year, if I didn't forget anything else.


*Spoiler*: __ 



I went in expecting what the trailer promised: smart political commentary and a speculation on how modern nations are unprepared to deal with larger threats. I got that.

I did not expect the language thing to be so well elaborated. I was expecting just hand-wavey technobabble to explain how Louise would translate the aliens.

I did not expect fucking time travel to be at the core of everything.

And for fuck's sake, I did not expect a a science fiction film so meta that it uses the science-ficion element it is creating (time being an illusion) as a storytelling device (the way it told the flashback of Louise's daughter). That was genius. The real achievement of this film. It is not just a film that creates something crazy, it creates something crazy and uses it to shape the narration itself.

Think about it. We see a detailed flashback of the daughter's life. Then, for the 1 hour or so, we see no mention of her, no flashbacks, nothing. The film plays with the possibility that Louise is broken because of her daughter, but she is actually not. Then, as the starts learning the alien's language, the flashbacks slowly start appearing. We think that is a stylistic choice, that the film is using it to show how Louise is stressed by her lack of sleep and sad because of her daughter, but it's actually the effect of the language rewriting her brain. Then the film progresses and the flashbacks become more common, until it clicks, and she becomes a transcendental being who can see all of time in an instant. Then past becomes future and the film goes back to the first scene.

It's just perfect. If this thing doesn't get at least nominated for an Oscar I'm gonna be pissed.

Reactions: Like 3


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## Sennin of Hardwork (Jan 23, 2017)

Saw the movie this past weekend and was glad it delivered. Good plot and the right amount of emotional touches/punches all around.

It had a good soundtrack as well, easily one of my favourite things about it, the movie's essence wouldn't feel complete without this one:


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## David (Jan 25, 2017)

I'm not a movie person, but Amy Adams is fucking wasted in MoS. This was one of my top 3 favorites of the year.

Reactions: Dislike 1


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## dr_shadow (Feb 9, 2017)

Finally saw it.

I love the premise, since I love language. I went in expecting a movie-length adaptation of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" (watch it!), and that's kind of what it was for the first third.

But unfortunately they didn't entirely follow through. The language is "cracked" in a voice-over montage, and we spend the rest of the movie in a conventional "man fears the unknown" type story. I wish the entire thing had been about how to talk to them.

Still there are far too few non-action sci-fi movies these days, so it gets an automatic A- just for trying.

Reactions: Agree 1


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## Jake CENA (Feb 10, 2017)

people ride the bandwagon hype and felt like they would sound cool and intellectual if they like this movie 

its an overrated piece of shit. amy adams should retire.

Hacksaw Ridge is a hundred times better!


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## Sennin of Hardwork (Feb 15, 2017)




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## dr_shadow (Feb 16, 2017)

WTH on Blu-Ray already?

It's still in theaters in China.


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## Psychic (Feb 19, 2017)

Finally got to see it today, was pretty excited after all the hype and truthfully, it delivered. Brilliantly directed, and worthy of it's Oscar nomination for best picture, a good 9.5/10, totally recommend. This movie left me in tears, I hate it when movies does that. The special effects was nothing to gawked about, I figured the plotline halfway through the movie, but was especially awed by how it was directed and how everything came into "pieces." Afterall, aren't we all just a piece of a much larger puzzle?


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## Psychic (Feb 19, 2017)

Mider T said:


> One thing is killing me though
> *Spoiler*: __
> 
> 
> ...



*Spoiler*: __ 



The sequel of course. Or maybe Arrival 3, part 2 could just be Louise and Ian trying to find a cure for their daughter's illness and defeating fate.





reiatsuflow said:


> You get some benefit of the doubt because you've apparently watched birdy the mighty, but the idea of language being able to fundamentally shift a person's observance of time into nonlinearity and allow them to see future is just as out-there as love being able to supersede space and time based on how we can love someone who is no longer present or near. These are not necessarily plausible ideas, and they're both put into movies that otherwise purport an above average amount of plausibility with their sets, physics, math and ideas.


Just because something can't be currently comprehend, doesn't mean it can't be plausible. I'm actually fluent in two languages and I can say that when I speak in each of these languages, there is a different mentality and mindset that one establishes when communicating. I'm also a bit clairvoyant, but before you freak out and dismiss my claim, do realized that just because you can't comprehend it doesn't mean that other clairvoyant like myself can't. Like science, the unknown world of supernatural powers is just one part of a much larger puzzle.


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## Mider T (Feb 19, 2017)

Psychic said:


> I'm also a bit clairvoyant, but before you freak out and dismiss my claim, do realized that just because you can't comprehend it doesn't mean that other clairvoyant like myself can't. Like science, the unknown world of supernatural powers is just one part of a much larger puzzle.


Stop Jenny.


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## Haruka Katana (Feb 19, 2017)

Watched this expecting ALIENS!!! Gets some heartwarming-ish stuff which I don't give a shit about. I blame myself for watching the misleading trailer and people saying there is a "twist".

When the twist is revealed I was like "K. So thats it?"

The movie feels different though, I'll give it that.

Not my kind of movie tbh.

Reactions: Agree 1


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