A series of promotional posters uploaded onto Facebook for the film Arrival features Hong Kong as a backdrop, but with one glaring curiosity – the Oriental Pearl Tower of Shanghai sits in front of a view of the city, some hundreds of miles from its actual location.

It is unknown whether this is the work of the aliens. But so far other cities don’t seem to have foreign monuments planted in their skylines and commenters don’t seem too happy with it.

arrival hong kong
Arrival posters. Yes, why is it here? Photo: Arrival movie via Facebook.

The comments section for the photo was flooded with the hashtag #HongKongisnotChina as Hongkongers picked up on the anomaly.

“Make sure you do research before you randomly put a building in China to HK landscape,” said one.

Another said “Hong Kong by itself is beautiful enough, we don’t need a Shanghai tower here. What do you think if we move the Statue of Liberty to Hollywood to make it more ‘USA’?”

Hong Kong arrival film
Out at sea. Photo: Google maps screenshot.

Interestingly, the coordinates at the bottom right of the poster also seem to correspond more with Shanghai than Hong Kong. So we don’t yet know if the mysterious spaceship actually moved Hong Kong to Shanghai, or meshed them together and then moved them out to sea.

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Chantal Yuen is a Hong Kong journalist interested in issues dealing with religion and immigration. She majored in German and minored in Middle Eastern studies at Princeton University.