I am not impressed by the movie. It was too trivial for my personal taste. All that happens in the movie can be summed up in the following bullet point: protagonist has flashbacks and nightmares, protagonist "communicates" with aliens, miscommunication occurs, they resolve the "problem", movie ends.
But that's not even what really bugs me out about the movie. Lets talk some real science here. I have been studying languages too and I am a physicist by trade so I think that I am more than qualified to make a judgement call. The biggest flaw of the movie is that it makes absolutely no sense. Apart from the fact that the aliens just started to scribble everything down instead of communicating vocally (If you were in a foreign country where people didn't speak your language you wouldn't just start scribbling things down). It's impossible to decipher a completely unknown language without prior knowledge about the syntax and etymological nature of the aforementioned language. If we were unable to decipher the Voynich manuscript for over 500 years we won't be able to decipher an alien language in a mere month. That's just a fact. Sorry
Both protagonists are technically superfluous. Everything that they've done in terms of deciphering the language could've been achieved in a timely fashion by simply utilizing ML (machine learning) algorithms. I know this to be true because that's what I'm currently doing for a living.
The movie ends with one of the protagonists asking the other: "You wanna make a baby?" How very classy and romantic... (Sarcasm)
Concluding remarks: the whole "they have a non-linear understanding of time" babble is pseudo-scientific hokum. Time is linear (because of entropy). I hate it when people pervert the hard sciences like that.
But that's not even what really bugs me out about the movie. Lets talk some real science here. I have been studying languages too and I am a physicist by trade so I think that I am more than qualified to make a judgement call. The biggest flaw of the movie is that it makes absolutely no sense. Apart from the fact that the aliens just started to scribble everything down instead of communicating vocally (If you were in a foreign country where people didn't speak your language you wouldn't just start scribbling things down). It's impossible to decipher a completely unknown language without prior knowledge about the syntax and etymological nature of the aforementioned language. If we were unable to decipher the Voynich manuscript for over 500 years we won't be able to decipher an alien language in a mere month. That's just a fact. Sorry
Both protagonists are technically superfluous. Everything that they've done in terms of deciphering the language could've been achieved in a timely fashion by simply utilizing ML (machine learning) algorithms. I know this to be true because that's what I'm currently doing for a living.
The movie ends with one of the protagonists asking the other: "You wanna make a baby?" How very classy and romantic... (Sarcasm)
Concluding remarks: the whole "they have a non-linear understanding of time" babble is pseudo-scientific hokum. Time is linear (because of entropy). I hate it when people pervert the hard sciences like that.