Arrival: Denis Villeneuve

The following is an abrupt excerpt of my review of the film for my church's newsletter.

Nobody knows what the Heptapods want when they first arrive on earth. Twelve of their egg-shaped vessels hover all over the planet, scattered in a seemingly random pattern. Once every 18 hours the bottoms of their ships open, allowing outsiders access inside so they can meet with them through an impenetrable force field. The handful of scientists and soldiers who ascend into the ship positioned above Montana all have different agendas. US Army Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) wants to determine if they’re invaders or conquerors. Theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) wants to exchange technologies and sciences. But all linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) wants is to communicate with them. She knows more than perhaps any other human being about languages and how cultures communicate with each other. Slowly throughout the course of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival she decodes their bizarre written language, a bizarre series of asymmetrical circles with no beginning or end. Each line, dash, and swirl of the circle completely alters the phrase’s meaning. To understand their language, Banks must literally learn how to think like the Heptapods. And in learning to think like the Heptapods, her life—indeed, all of humanity—is irrevocably changed.
 
Arrival couldn't have come at a better time. Our politics have never been more divisive. Our rhetoric has never been more hateful. Our willingness to listen to and love our neighbor has atrophied to a near gangrenous rot. Yet Villeneuve’s new film claims that the only thing that can truly transform humanity is the simple power of empathy. It’s difficult to go too deeply into the plot of Arrival without revealing ruinous spoilers. What’s worse, unlike most films, how its story is told is just as important as its story itself. So I must tread carefully. Essentially, Arrival explores the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a theory which claims that a language’s structure affects how its speakers interpret and interact with the world. Fairly early on Banks discovers that the Heptapod’s language is non-linear, meaning that their species interprets time completely differently than humans. Whereas humans experience time in a straight line, Heptapods experience the past, present, and future all at the same time. So how do you ask questions of such a species? Can questions even exist for Heptapods since questions assume a state of not-knowing? What need does a species have for inquiry if the answers to all questions are already known?

Yet Banks and her team spend weeks carefully studying the aliens and attempting to communicate with them. But their work gets interrupted when all twelve spaceships transmit a simultaneous message: “Offer Weapon.” Banks insists that their word for “Weapon” might be the same as “Tool” and they may be trying to initiate trade, but the message has spooked the various world governments to a point of mass hysteria. As international cooperation disintegrates as armies all over the world mobilize for a pre-emptive strike, Banks starts receiving odd visions. It would seem that learning the Heptapod’s language has literally begun to rewrite her neural pathways. For the first time, she understands what she needs to do to save the future of both of their species.

The metaphor isn’t hard to miss: by taking the time understand our neighbors, we transform ourselves.

8/10