I saw Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival last
November. As soon as the credits rolled I wanted to see
it again. Not simply because I had
enjoyed it so much but because I wanted to go back and hear the opening words
again. I knew I had not fully understood them the first
time round. No-one would. You need to see the film to the end to
understand the beginning.
I am glad I didn’t see it again
straight away, but had to wait until the
DVD came out, because that gave me more time to reflect on that
first viewing, and prepare myself for the second, this time knowing.
A long time ago I was running an
international exchange and took the young adults taking part in it to see Out of
Africa. As Meryl Streep said the
opening line ‘Once I had a farm in Africa’ the young English woman sitting next
to me burst into tears. “Are you alright?” I asked. “Yes,’
she replied ‘its just that I have seen
this film before, and I know what those words mean.” By the end of the movie knew what she
meant. Seeing Arrival the second time did not move me to tears, but it did move me profoundly as line after
line resonated with new and deeper emotional and intellectual meaning.
The script was adapted by Eric Heisserer
from ‘The Story of Your Life’ written
by the multi-award winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang. I have now read that too, and understand
why Heisserer was so keen to get it filmed – and why Hollywood was so reluctant
to do so. For a start it has a female
lead. She does not take her clothes
off. There is no sex. She is not another Ripley. There
are no fights. She is a linguist. There
are aliens but they are not monsters. Their is really very little action. The film is determinedly thoughtful. It
is however profoundly moving while not being in any way sentimental or
melodramatic. Its emotional punch is long
delayed and relies on us on following the slow intellectual reveal. I
really do not want to issue any
spoilers. But I do urge you to see it,
and then to see it again. My original review is below.
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 is 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 Arrival 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 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 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 visual record of a language was not about alphabetical or phonetic 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 lies under the surface of Arrival, but not far below. Ted Chiang, the multi-award winning science fiction writer who wrote the source Story of Your Life, is also a professional
physicist, but it seems that like Carl Sagan he has 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 also 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. Villeneuve has said that he would not have made the film without her in it. I can see why. She underplays so well that under the clear 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 clear and 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. And while we
are being led along our way we are exposed to some heavy duty theory presented
cleanly and unpatronizingly. This is
good hard-core sf, and then more. Much more.
