I was underwhelmed by Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013) Despite impressive performances I thought it
really took itself far too seriously. Sicario (2015) impressed me much more –
but again I was not sure what it’s moral pov was. It seems that Villeneuve wasn’t sure either. He
is quoted as saying that ‘Sicario about the alienation of the cycles of
violence, how at one point we are in those spirals of violence and ask
ourselves, 'Is there a solution?' My movie raises the question; it doesn't give
any answer. (IMDb)
But his new film Arrival
engaged my mind and moved my heart.
This movie tackles the well worked theme of
first alien contact, but does so in a remarkable and original way. It avoids the lazy shortcuts taken by so
many sf books and films (the Carl Sagan inspired Contact excepted) of gifting
our extra-terrestrial visitors with our language. Way back in the 1960s’ SETI (the Search for
Extra-terrestrial Intelligence and NASA commissioned John B. Lilly to find out
how to communicate with an alien mind - using dolphins as his research field. So in Arrivals
our unlikely – and sensibly chosen - lead
researcher is a linguistic expert, Doctor Louise Banks (Amy Adams.) She has a physicist as a colleague in case
math’s is a basis for communication – as on the plaque of Voyager. But it is Louise who takes the lead, trying
to find a common vocabulary to discover the visitor’s intentions.
The first words of the movie can actually alert
us to the fact that this movie is about time; beginnings and endings. Language, our language, is also about beginnings and endings. You may have come across text in which the
order of the letters of each word are jumbled, but as long as the first and
last letters are correct our minds sorts out the rest almost instantaneously. But what if the record of a language was not
about alphabetical sequences? Asian
ideograms work in a different way, presenting the whole idea in one image (I
wonder if dyslexia is a problem for those who read Chinese).
But if a picture is worth a thousand words,
and even a thousand words could not in fact communicate the reality of a
reasonably complex picture, how might that language work , not only in practice
but in and on our minds? Arrival follows Chomsky’s notion that language shapes our thinking
even more than our thinking shapes our language. A radically different kind of language might
radically change not only our thinking but how our minds work.
And so we come back to the concept of
time. Physicists, it seems, have no way
of fitting the concept of ‘now’ into their work. In Rudolf Carnap’s Autobiography he recounted a conversation with Albert Einstein
in which “Einstein said that the problem of the now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the now
means something special for man, something essentially different from the past
or the future, but that this important difference cannot and does not occur
within physics. That this experience
cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable
resignation.” ( The Philosophy of
Rudolf Carnap, Chicago; Library of Living Philosophers, 1963).
It has been suggested that the ‘flow of
time’ from now to now is simply a construct of the mind. We receive so much information via our
senses that we need filters in order to focus.
We ‘deaf out’ the many voices in
a restaurant in order to hear the one person we are paying attention too. Maybe we cannot cope with any overload of
information unless it is parceled into packets of time, a series of
‘nows’. What if they are all
happening at the same time? Could we
cope? This filtering could shape our
experience of time. But if, as Einstein
believed, the fact of now cannot and does not occur within physics then maybe a language that imparted huge
amounts of information in one instant, rather than in sequential parcels, could
reshape the receiving mind, and allow time itself to be experienced
differently.
Most of this lied under the surface of Arrivals, but not far below. Ted Chiang, who wrote the source Story of Your Life, is a professional physicist,
but it seems that like Carl Sagan he was a deep interest in humanity. It has often been said that sf is never
ultimately about aliens, but about ourselves.
So this story has a human being at
its heart. And she is truly brave.
Politicians and members of the Military are governed by fear; fear of any failure
that could cost careers or lives. But
true scientists are not afraid of failure.
Every failure is a learning experience.
When the politicians and military are pulling back – or wanting to
attack - Louise is willing to go
forward, to expose herself and reach out.
Later, much later, we discover that there is another dimension to her courage – remembering that
the word’s root is coeur, the
heart.
So what about the sf hardware? There is a ship, in fact 12 identical ships
arrive and hover over seemingly random points around the globe. They are beautiful in their simplicity and
seem to be hewn from raw rock rather that molded from polished metal. The fact that they may come from another dimension
is suggested by the way gravity behaves rather differently within them. (String theory suggests the possibility of
11 other space-time dimensions – space Time
dimensions).
The aliens themselves are properly
alien. They might not challenge the
radical alien-ness of those in China Mieville’s wonderful novels (his creatures
are philosophically as well as physically utterly different), but they will
certainly do.
And of course their difference is shown, crucially,
in their written form.
And so at last to the actors. In Sicario
Villeneuve cast Emily Blunt in the lead role.
Here he cast Amy Adams. These
are two highly versatile and gifted actors.
Consider Emily in Edge of Tomorrow
(aka Live Die Repeat) and The Girl on the Train. Consider Amy in American Hustle and Enchanted. Here Amy underplays so well that under
her undemonstrative surface we see so much.
She is the still centre of the storm,
and we understand why Jeremy
Renner’s character, the physicist Ian Donnelly, stands back to let her
lead. Michael Stuhlbarg and Forest Whitaker have
rather under developed roles as the leaders of the CIA and military on site,
and do their best.
Eric Heisserer wrote the script from Chiang’s story, and it
is clean. Rather a change from his
usual horror fare.
Bradford Young’s cinematographer’s pallet
is suitably subdued (He also filmed Selma
and A Most Violent Year. )
Johann Johannsson wrote the score (as he
did for Prisoners, Sicario and The Theory of Everything) and it suits both the visual and emotional
content.
In the end we find out that this is not
your standard SF movie, it is not about a hostile alien invasion – or even the Close Encounter’s benignity. We have been expertly misled, and the reveal
carries a heavy punch to the heart. Like
a good detective story we had been given all the clues, in fact the biggest
clue came right at the start. But while
we are being led along our way we are exposed to some heavy duty theory
presented cleanly and patronizingly. This is good
hard-core sf, and then more. Much
more.
