K-SCORE: 71
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writer: Eric Heisserer
Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Tzi Ma
Spoiler Level: Major
Arrival is a thoughtful, strikingly beautiful, eerie film about first contact with an alien race. The primary conflict in the film is the barrier that I believe would exist if aliens were to actually arrive on Earth: communication. How do we, having evolved language completely separately from them, with completely different biology, communicate with them, and what natural tensions exist between us as we struggle to develop a meaningful answer to the question: why are you here? Not only is the subject matter interesting, it’s deftly handled as its protagonist is an expert in linguistics who takes logical steps to attempt to communicate with the seven-legged creatures from another world. It’s so careful in the way it progresses its plot that it’s often slow, which is fine, because it’s also contemplative. And then it introduces a time travel element at the end and turns the whole thing into an irreconcilable tangle of future-vision fugue-state gobbledigook with no greater narrative value than Japanese tentacle porn.
People are going to read that, (and by people I mean my brother Graham) and say, “Whoa, that’s not fair,” but I’m going to make a case for it. You’re looking at a story that was already inherently dramatic and that had been quite successful at getting you to think about the importance of communication, of the connection between language and thinking, of the intricacy with which our biology and our writing system and ability to articulate verbal desires are connected, and it did so through a science fiction lens that is both classic and intriguing. You’d be hard-pressed to find an intelligent person out there who hasn’t, at some point in his or her life, been interested in the notion of meeting and talking to lifeforms from beyond Earth and what that would be like. I’m at the far end of that spectrum, admittedly, being as I’ve read at length on the subject of The Fermi Paradox and written entire epics of science fiction featuring alien life. I’m also obsessively curious about linguistics and love the English language despite its faults and redundancies very much. Still, I can’t be the only one interested in this story (unlike A Song of Ice and Fire, which, despite its popularity, was written just for me and my kin.) So in a world where the story progresses just a little further without the time travel elements, you get to witness if the other countries irrevocably screwed up their first contact and if this linguist, by discovering ways to communicate with the aliens no one else could come up with, reveals the truth behind the ultimate question, whatever that truth may be. Which, in fact, you do get with this ending. And so there’s some closure there, but it’s ruined. Ruined completely and utterly by introducing a series of paradoxes that I now feel compelled, as the forefront time-travel narrative journalist of my generation, to explain in excruciating detail.
“Amazingly, for the umpteenth time in the last couple years, I’m forced to believe that a character is motivated by her desire to fulfill her own cosmological destiny.”
Okay, so what you have here is a fixed timeline theory of the universe. At other times I might have even called it a linear timeline theory, which would be ironic because at one point Louise, Amy Adams’s character, says that the aliens don’t see time linearly. Regardless of what they claim to see, the film Arrival falls squarely in this camp, which is to say the time traveler (in this case just a series of seers and not travelers at all, but it doesn’t really matter) are powerless to change the course of history even if they have knowledge of the future. Everything is pre-ordained. It’s the darker and easier-to-write of the two base concepts when dealing with time travel. Amazingly, for the umpteenth time in the last couple years, I’m forced to believe that a character is motivated by her desire to fulfill her own cosmological destiny. Louise, having learned the alien language, rewires her brain to think in heptapod and therefore perceives time as they do, which means she can see flashes of the future. Through these flashes she sees herself having a meeting with a Chinese general and convincing him not to launch an assault on the alien starship in that part of the world, which, apparently she did (or will do (will have did - to channel my inner Douglas Adams) by calling his personal cell number and reciting his wife’s dying words to him in Mandarin. This is an obvious paradox - the easy one. Where’s the start point? How could she first say that to him without him having said that to her, and even if she did say that all-important thing then why would he feel compelled to share those details with her that she should already have had, (or will has), and even if he did make that choice, why would she feel panicked that she has to make that phone call, which presumably she knows for a certainty that she will make? That’s low-hanging fruit.
“the paradoxes are ignored by means of very selective confusion”
Let’s get into the aliens. The grand answer to the question on everyone’s mind, viewer and characters alike, is “because humanity has to help us out in 3000 years.” So the aliens come to Earth because they know for a fact that they will need the help of humanity from some very distant threat at a very far point in the future. If they know that, then presumably they also know how that assistance goes. Again, this is a linear timeline universe. There is only one path. Otherwise Amy Adams’s cancer kid might not have died (more on that later) among other things. But if they know humanity comes to help them, then they know before arriving how the first contact will go. They have to. Because with foresight in a linear timeline, to know that you need help is to know that you will receive help. The whole premise of Arrival hinges upon BOTH parties struggling to communicate with one another. The paradox of the aliens knowing ahead of time how this will all play out, because they don’t perceive time linearly, wrecks that entirely. Abbott and Costello, those charming seven-legged giants, are kind of assholes in hindsight. Because they should already know English or whatever means they use to communicate with humans in the distant future. Instead they’re pretending to learn and to teach as Louise and Ian are miming walking and writing down names and pantomiming to convey meaning behind the great glass wall of fogginess. Basically they should have landed and started writing English phrases on the wall, which, I guess, would be about fulfilling cosmological destinies because that’s what Louise and they want most. But that didn’t happen. Instead the paradoxes are ignored by means of very selective confusion. Because no one is actually traveling in time and just knowing the future, the plot can make some sense if you consider the vital notion that these seers, Abbott, Costello, and Louise are all super confused about their purpose most of the time and have flashes of that primary motivation of walking the time path set out by the great universe God O’ Time. And that plot, unlike the one I described at the start of my intro paragraph, isn’t interesting at all. It’s stupid.
The twist of the time travel is good only in that it delays the point in the film where you’re thinking about time travel until the very end. Because they want to reveal the dead daughter flashbacks as actually flashforwards, the film is enjoyable and encouraging much of the way. The daughter, Hannah, serves no purpose in the alien story, except as an extension of Louise’s story of a linguist, that, through learning an alien language becomes a modern day oracle. That she decides to have the kid knowing she will get sick and die is unsurprising to me, knowing how these heroes tend to be motivated, but mostly I don’t care. That Jeremy Renner’s character Ian ends up being the father is not surprising considering the kid isn’t half black or half Asian and the only male characters in the film besides him are Forrest Whitaker and Tzi Ma.
The visual art of Arrival and the well-navigated discussion of language is horrendously wasted on the bad narrative choices made in the conclusion. In an effort to be a more positive person, I’m going to try to look back on it and only remember the thrumming bass sounds the aliens made and their creepy but somehow peaceful designs, and of course their stunningly awesome written language made of circular inkblots that read the same backwards and forwards. There is a theme of that, backwards and forwards being the same, which ties into the time travel admittedly, but the cost of doing business with alien chronology, as they say, (should will have says) is too high.