Movies & TV

I feel like most expensive movies with American production companies involved have the US State Department paying to have influence in them. Especially so if there's tanks, planes, helicopters, or other military hardware involved in the movie.

I broadly agree with you except for the spy balloon thing - the US didn't shoot first second and third and ask questions later, the US let it fly over the entire country. Only once the totally harmless balloon had been amped up in the media as a yellow peril foreign threat did the US shoot it down.

Potentially unpopular opinion: I hated it.

The Chinese weather balloon tells us all we need to know about that.

My only gripe with this is that they obviously knew that it was just a weather balloon, or at the very least that it wouldn't shoot back so I don't think this really supports your point even though I think you're right. Though I personally think the Euros would shoot first.

As much as I love Villeneuve's movies he does seem to have a ... hesitance when it comes to asian characters/people. The stuff in Arrival can obviously be waved off as just 'China bad' but I think it goes deeper. His next movie, Blade Runner 2049, has a lot of superficial asian influence but has even fewer (none iirc) asian characters than the original. Obviously Dr. Yueh is in the book so its hard to lay blame for him on Villeneuve but there's no other asian actors despite the Fremen being descended from Zensunni Wanderers. Presumably they weren't all just Middle Eastern and obviously Zendaya and Javier Bardem are neither so it seems like an odd omission.

Not really sure if its an intentional bias or not but Blade Runner especially would have benefited from having at least one named asian character. Why is everything in Japanese but there's no Japanese people?

I haven't read the original short story, but I'm sure that it didn't have this element.

Yup, there was no overarching "hostile nations learn the valuable moral lesson of international cooperation" plot in the original short story - no Orientalist story beats about the ruthless Russians summarily executing their scientists to maintain state secrets or irrational Chinese general inciting for war against the super-advanced spacefaring aliens based on mahjong (you would think that the Chinese linguists would also realise that there may be a competitve bias in mahjong-based communication, but apparently Amy Adams can understand Chinese culture better than all the Chinese scientists combined🙄... I wonder why ). The heptapods in the short story sent down to Earth 112 two-way communication "looking glasses" (instead of 12 spaceships in the film) and the main character was a linguist assigned to 1 of the 9 looking glasses within US borders. If there's any "political" commentary/conflict in the short story, it was between the American linguists/scientists who are motivated by the opportunitiy to gain alien knowledge/exchange knowledge with the heptapods, the US state apparatus (i.e., the Army colonel & State Depatment ghoul supervising the scientists) which can only view the alien encounter as a belligerent and zero sum competition (between the US and the aliens, and between the US and other nations). Instead of the geopolitics, the short story focused a little more on the main character's relationship with her future daughter and also went much deeper into the maths/linguistic theory behind the heptapod language.

I don't really have any solid evidence to back this up, but given that the movie was released around late 2016, my theory is that the adaptation's "China/Russia bad" elements come from Eric Heisserer (the adaptation scriptwriter) ambiently absorbing the illegal immigrant discourse lingering in the American ideological atmosphere in the lead-up to the Trump/Hillary elections and unconsciously distorting the ideas of American xenophobia/paranoia/military bloodthirst into a narrative about non-American countries being xenophobic/brutal (after all, it's almost impossible for Americans to truly imagine themselves as actually being the evil empire; Heisserer seems to be an apolitical but generally liberal type, so I doubt that he gave too much deliberate thought to the extended implications of the international geopolitics plot additions of his script). Either that, or it was studio interference to add a "sexy" political thriller type plot conflict instead of focusing purely on egghead debates about physics and phonemes, and/or a mandate from the DoD for the filming to get access to US military resources.

Same with Gravity. Although gravity was a poo movie. But it still begins by accusing the Russians of using an anti satellite weapon which caused the Kessler syndrome that kick starts the movies events. Something that the US has literally done a few years previously.

I think that's the wrong take. It's been a year since I rewatched but isn't it implied that the US nuked China because they were making better progress in decoding?

I feel like the US is constantly described portrayed as arbitrarily hostile and belligerent