Actually you missed the point about the two movies. As I've said, Arrival might easily have been about a woman raising, and treasuring every moment with, a daughter who'd been diagnosed with a prenatal defect. The aliens and their sense of time is just a gimmick uneccessary to the crux of the story.
A bullshit claim to downplay the significance of the sci-fi in this story in order to reach your point. Yes, it's about how she treasures every moment, but without the context of her knowing 100% exactly how she would live every moment, how it would affect the man she loved, and how it would affect her, yet still choosing to live that life, and experience that pain, is what makes it so much more impactful than if she's just choosing to have her daughter in spite of a birth defect. There is added emotional and moral weight to the story with the fact that she knows all that she does. The arrival itself, maybe, you could explain as unnecessary, as anything could have given her this ability to see time as she does, but again, without going through the journey she does, as she goes through it, I don't know that we as the audience would have been impacted as much by the decision. One thing to consider, when going into the film, we assume, at first, that we are seeing her after she's had to deal with the loss of her daughter, this actually is what makes the twist that she's now experiencing time in a non-linear fashion so goddamn interesting and therefore, integral to the plot. Sure, they could have done it another way, but to do so would likely have robbed the film of its meaning.
As for the AI girl in Blade Runner, she goes through a pinnochio story. She does become "real"--indeed, her experiencing rain for the first time is for me the most exhilarating, and human, scene of the entire movie. Though Ryan Gosling is initially taken with the giant hologram after her demise, she quickly reveal to be just that--a hollow facsimile of the woman he'd lost.
That wasn't the impression I got from it, nor the impression I've seen garnered from other people who've commentated on it. However art is subjective in this way, and thus can be taken differently depending on how you personally feel about the situation. I took it to be the final betrayal of the story, the final nail in the coffin of his life of lies. You took it to be the pain of loss over a pinocchio love. Both interpretations are plausible, in the way the story is presented, but I'd even wager that it proves my point then, that the fact that she's a hologram construct is integral to her character progression in the film.
It's interesting you'd bring up 1984 since it's a great example of why the science and technology is actually superfluous in a great sci-fi story. The dystopia of 1984 is distinctly low-tech; in fact, I don't recall any plot points involving non-existent technology--and it's that much better for it.
I can't agree with that. What sci-fi does, as I've stated, is allow us to explore the morality of technology. In 1984, which was initially written in 1944, you'll remember, they have video phone technology, which is used in congruence with planted microphones and other tech to complete the surveillance state. All of this may be believable to you, but to someone living in 1944? Hardly. Television, while it had existed in crude forms since the 20s didn't really reach the home market until after WWII. And the idea of bugs that didn't need to be picked up routinely as they broadcast a signal to wherever it was being recorded, would also have been quite the stretch of the imagination. The story uses this future tech to explore the dangers of a surveillance state as the tech gets more and more powerful. Dangers we have seemingly ignored, as you look around at all the surveillance we allow through the technology as it exists today.
