So I didn’t watch this when it came out, because it’s an adaptation of a Ted Chiang story that seemed fundamentally un-adaptable to me. Like, there was no chance that this was going to be a better version of the story than the one that he wrote.

And it isn’t. But it’s still very good, which is a legit accomplishment, because… well, like I say, this should have been un-adaptable, and it should be super-confusing, but it ended up being neither of those things. It’s clear what’s going on (although not Hollywood-style “spell it out for the idiots” clear, which probably means that a pile of newspaper critics were baffled that it made no sense; but it’s more explicit than like Soderbergh’s Solaris or Aronofsky’s The Fountain), and it manages to put both pathos and suspense into a movie that could easily have had neither of those things.

I will say, though, I feel like it probably only works at all if you haven’t read the story (or if, like me, you read it in the waning years of the old millennium, and remember it in only the broadest of outlines), because there are a couple of big reveals that would lose all impact if you knew about them ahead of time. So probably if you’ve read the story recently, wait another decade or so for your memory to fade before you watch it, idk.

Random tangent: The music at the beginning sounded supes-familiar, and I’m like, “this is Max Richter, right? It totally is, right?” so I googled the soundtrack album… which had zero Max Richter on it. But then the Amazon reviews for it are all pissy that it excluded the music from the beginning, because oh hey it turns out that the guy who composed the (atmospheric enough, but forgettable) soundtrack for the rest of the movie didn’t do the opening thing, they licensed that Richter piece (and apparently were too cheap to also license it for the soundtrack), so go figure.