Denis Villeneuve’s (“Sicario”) Arrival is a
story about the power of communication, the
illusory nature of time, and the importance of
words and language in creating our conception of
the world. Written by Eric Heisserer from the
short story, “Story of Your Life,” by author Ted
Chiang, it is a thinking person’s science
fiction film that does more than offer bad guys
threatening good guys. While its aliens are no
great shakes in the looks department, here they
have something akin to brains and are actually
trying to teach us something which, given recent
historical events, might be problematic.
The story is one we have become familiar with in
varying scenarios over the years. Space ships
(in this case, 12) from another planet land in
widely diverse areas on Earth and proceed to
cause the world’s great movers and shakers to
shake a bit more than usual. Of course, the most
trigger happy ones are not us but Russia and
China (who else?). The key player in the
scenario is Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a
Professor of Linguistics. After word spreads
around campus of the startling landings, Louise,
who is mourning the death of her teenage
daughter Hannah from cancer, is called upon by
Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) who asks her to
use her language skills to communicate with the
aliens in order to discover the reason for their
visit.
Though the focus is on setting up contact, the
film flashes backwards and forwards in time as
we see her daughter Hannah as a baby being
tucked into bed and her final days in the
hospital. Reluctantly, Dr. Banks agrees to go to
Montana where one of the giant oblong ships is
hovering just off the ground. Here she is
assisted by physicist Dr. Ian Connelly (Jeremie
Renner) who is more interested in the scientific
implications of the visit rather than what it
portends for the human race. Only allowed on the
space ship during strictly enforced visiting
hours, Louise and her team find themselves
floating through a large tunnel, finally
reaching what looks like a big movie screen in
which they can see and attempt to communicate
with the aliens.
The visitors are seven-legged entities that are
designated “heptapods” and look like they just
escaped from a Walt Disney promo for a future
Jurassic park movie. In a rare attempt at humor,
Ian labels two of them Abbott and Costello. It
is not clear who’s on first but it is obvious
that Bud and Lou are not fluent in English and
can only communicate in a non-verbal, symbolic
language drawn in pictographs. The scenes that
setup the first encounter are the most affecting
and the message is clear that communication
between groups that lack a common frame of
reference takes patience and determination.
The heptapods’ drawings allow Louise to
understand that their purpose has to do with us
helping them or them helping us, whoever lasts
for another three thousand years, a dubious
proposition as far as Earth is concerned.
Standing out as a good candidate for
misinterpretation, the words “offer weapons”
suggest something sinister to CIA agent (Michael
Stuhlbarg). Of course, this throws the world
into a panic and the film becomes bogged down in
military maneuvers, ultimatums, and time bombs.
Ultimately, however, the film focuses on what
unites us rather than what divides us and Louise
and Ian’s personal story and their changing
perspective of time adds a broader dimension.
Arrival contains an Oscar-caliber performance by
Amy Adams whose quest for knowledge and touching
personal story allows us to identify with her
search for answers. While the film is unafraid
to tackle big questions and contains intriguing
notions about the nature of time and how it can
affect our personal relationships, its
atmosphere is smothered in a sort of cloudy
gloom that lacks any sense of the mystery and
wonder present in such earlier sci-fi films such
as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
What does stand out, however, is the realization
that, as Werner Erhard expressed it, “Every word
brings with it its meaning, but meanings are not
inherently there. Language gives the world its
meaning. From this stand, things shift—our
speaking impacts the world to match our words."
If we have any desire to create a future that
nurtures us, as we enter a period of
transformation, we have to create a new
conversation that questions our way of being in
the world, an authentic new story that is based
on an abiding sense of community, an intimate
connection with nature, and an unconditional
love in Samuel Beckett’s phrase, “for the stars
in the sky and, on earth, the brave little
lights of men.”
GRADE: B+
Howard Schumann