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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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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.