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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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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
They said China interpreted the aliens wrong because they used Mahjong as the basis of their communication (๐) so they would "inherently be competitive from using a competitive game." So when the aliens say "there is no time, use weapon" they interpreted that as a threat - but it was far more literal, there really isn't a thing we percieve as time and weapon was a misinterpretation of their word for their language.
I think in the background lore at some point the ships were attacked but they don't interact with the local environment at all, they don't exhaust anything and aren't affected by anything so presumably they were attacked at some point to find out that they weren't able to be attacked.
The US side was more like, there's the military wanting to press the nuclear button and then the egg head libs that are barely holding them back with a drip feed of progress.
I agree with OP, if the Arrival aliens actually came it would be the US who would interpret everything as a hostile act lol and they'd have the shorter hair trigger on launching nukes.
Nah, I think you're totally misremembering the film: not only does the US not attack/nuke China, at no point in the film is the US state portrayed as an initial or arbitrary aggressor. The film only shows the US "rationally" reacting to the aggression and secretiveness of other nations/parties. The film makes sure to show that the US only halts their communication/information-sharing with the other nations only after China and Russia have already themselves gone off the grid.
The only time US can even remotely be interpreted as an unprovoked aggressor was when the alien spacecraft that the main characters were at was bombed by US soldiers. Even then, the bombing was orchestrated by rogue Army grunts radicalised by Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorists - there's a scene near the 58-minute mark where a couple of soldiers in a medical tent are watching an internet video where some rando with a talk radio microphone rant about the alien contact being handled by "the same government that ruined our healthcare and bankrupted our military" and pushing for a preemptive "show of force" against the aliens, which sets up the implied motivation of the renegade soldiers - so that movie audience are reassured that American war crimes are just the unfortunate/unintended result of unwashed and uneducated individual bad apples in lower/middle echelons of the US military and that the eminently levelheaded leadership/intitutions of American military/state would never dream of recklessly provoking conflict for their material and/or strategic advantage...
I don't remember that honestly. If it was implied it was very subtle. And overshadowed by China bad.