The Good And The Bad In The Movie “Arrival”

spoilers ahead The movie “Arrival”, directed by Denis Villeneuve came out in 2016. It starred Amy Adams in the lead role as a linguistics professor, Louise Banks, and Jeremy Renner as Ian, a physicist. They are brought to one of the twelve alien landing sites to figure out what the aliens want, but for that they need to learn their language and teach them English. The good thing, maybe even amazing is that this movie is one of the rare philosophical movies today, with an amazing story and concept. One of the best elements of the movie is the way it handles the focus on communication and understanding. Communication can be incredibly difficult, especially when it comes to other species and backgrounds that are much different from ours. The Arrival does a great job of portraying this challenge, showing how nonverbal cues and inflections can be used to bridge the gap between cultures. Banks and the aliens must work hard to make each other understand, showing a great amount of mutual respect for the other. The movie also focuses heavily on the idea of time and how it can affect our lives. They presented that idea through the alien language, saying that it’s non linear, but circular, a cycle. Just as we are three dimensional beings, we are not bound by length or width, the aliens and their language are fourth dimensional and are not bound by time, so anyone who speaks the language is also not bound by time, but can see their past, present and future at the same time. That’s where we get the answer why the aliens even came to Earth. They saw their future, saw they needed help from humans and came to Earth to help the humans evolve in order for the humans to be able to help in the future. To help them evolve they offered humans a weapon, their language. The first human who learned the language was Louise Banks who throughout the movie actually sees the future and the past at the same time. We begin the movie thinking her daughter had already died but then learn that her daughter hadn’t even been born she was just seeing her future. But there’s a philosophical question right there, once she can see the future, can she change it? Should she have a daughter she knows is going to die? Or is she going to try to save her life? And did the aliens see their demise and are trying to prevent that by getting the help of humans and by that trying to change the future, or did they already see the humans helping them.

I also really love the design of the aliens and alien ships. Although you can’t really see the full body of the aliens because they are mostly shown as the picture above, and the one time you can see them they’re not very visible, because they are covered in smoke, I still love the ominous feeling they give off. Below is the picture of how the aliens really look. One bad thing I want to mention is that the movie shows the situation from only one point of view, America’s. It’s very subjective instead of taking the true scientist route and being more objective. I think showing how the entire situation was unveiling in different cultures could have been more interesting and that they wasted that opportunity to make an even better film.

 

Overall I think the positives out way the negatives. This is a pretty good and fun movie and I will always recommend it to sci-fi fans.