Spoilers for the movie, obviously.
How dare the US pretend like they would be the peaceful nation and that China would be belligerent the entire time. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie. The atmosphere, setting, plot, editing. Everything was so fantastic. The aliens, the themes about language and culture.
And I know that it was a US made movie with US main characters, but everytime they mentioned China being hostile felt so cringe. I doubt Villanueve was being intentionally anti-China, he just needed a non US ally to be belligerent so the protagonists would have a clock to race against. But even having Russia in that role would make more sense. And even weirder that China was ruled by a general from the People’s Liberation Army.
Now this isn’t me coming from a “China would never do anything bad” perspective. It’s just silly pretending that the US wouldn’t immediately send sidewinder missiles into that thing before it landed. The US would shoot first, second, and third before thinking to ask questions. The Chinese weather balloon tells us all we need to know about that. Now for the sake of the movie I was willing to accept the premise, but when it became all of the non West countries acting hostile it stung with me.
I think I’m only ranting because it was such a good movie and the whole theme of language being the key to understanding culture was undermined by making China the Bad Guys. If this was a shlockier, worse movie I wouldn’t care to complain about that detail. 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.