I guess I had not considered starfish. That would be interesting to consider, an intelligent being developing with a distributive nervous system rather than a central nervous system.
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AIG posted a review/commentary on the movie also. Pretty reasonable and had some good points, but completely ignored the translation issues that might have relevance to Bibical translation.
A bit late here, perhaps a spoiler alert (better safe than sorry!) but after I saw the film I thought a lot can be said about both science and faith, not to mention the fact that the aliens definitely were modeled after octopuses, which I thought was a nice nod to the species’ intelligence. I was delighted to see you blogged about it (mostly because cinema is something I’m much more equipped to discuss than biology!).
Denis Villeneuve is one of the absolute best filmmakers working right now, and some of his early films (Prisoners specifically) have a bit to say about faith as well, though maybe ambiguously so.
I’m glad you pointed out the score as helping to create tension–one of Villeneuve’s strong points is in heart-racing, incredibly tense scenes. After seeing what the film was about when it was announced he was making it, I was kind of surprised because it didn’t quite line up with his earlier work tonally. But sure enough, the tension was excruciating when they were boarding the vessel for the first time.
I think it also has a bit to say about whether our lives are worth living, given we know that they will end eventually. This is where science, I think, comes to a full stop, and a relationship with Christ shows how we can rise above the futility and entropy a materialistic worldview ends in.
Thanks for the great post, and I hope you do some more film-oriented ones as they come about!
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I like The Message for personal devotional use in theory. I don’t use it myself, but it’s not because I’m opposed to it, I just never got around to getting a copy and my ESV does me fine enough (as does NT Wright’s New Testament translation/commentary series). But Eugene Peterson himself said he doesn’t think it ought to be used in any teaching or instructional capacity, as it started out as a personal thing he did for members of his congregation who were having trouble praying through Psalms. It’s a touching story, and I think there’s a great place for such a translation, though it’s inevitably more likely to have subjective pitfalls, I think, when one uses it in a formal capacity. It does add a good perspective.
Thanks Noah. There’s another movie post coming this week.
Yes. It reinforced to me that we can’t really think outside of time. I tried explaining it to a friend, and came up against the limitations of our own language and concepts.
Next time you discuss TIME with someone… this old imagery might be of help:
Hold up an imaginary length of thread or string … Hold it up high. This represents the time of a person, or a people or whatever you like. I find it suits the lifespan of a person.
Now imagine several threads being held up… held above the open palm of your other hand.
And then lower the coils of thread into the open palm. And now suggest that rather than each thread happening in a chronological order, from one end as the beginning to the other end as the ending - - that the events along all these threads all happen at once.
And where one person’s thread touches another person’s thread is the time and place that we interact with another’s time line.
I have found that this imagery can sometimes set the mood and context for further discussion …
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I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t really comment - but as a Bible translator, I have enjoyed reading this thread!
The movie has a truly diabolical example of misunderstood signals… summarized by the word: “Kangaroo”.
As someone who wants all his science fiction to be true … I fidgeted terribly on that part of the movie. But I suppose it is TRUE that sometimes a linguist makes up a good story to drive home a point … as long as it doesn’t get published that way!
George
I enjoyed that too, just because of the irony, and the way it showed how you can wow those who are not knowledgeable by bluffing your way with nonsense. Not that that ever happens on this site and elsewhere on the internet.
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