The most interesting part of Arrival, by far, is its premise—the alien invasion movie for linguistics students—because the characters and dialogue only explore the range between boring and pathetic. This is not to say that the movie is not interesting or potentially worth seeing, but it’s very much a work of modern sci-fi that adopts clichés to compensate for deficiencies in an otherwise well-constructed plot.
The film is written by Eric Heisserer, who up until now has mostly been kicking around re-makes of and sequels to classic horror films (The Thing, Final Destination 5), as an adaptation of a sci-fi short story called Story of Your Life. The stories both center on Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguistics professor working at the University of Montreal, and her attempts to figure out the language of a race of alien beings and act as an interpreter for the U.S. military. The film adds a subplot about a dead daughter and a ticking-clock element in the form of Chinese General Shang, a military bad-guy so generic he barely gets to speak until the closing five minutes of the movie.
[vsw id=”tFMo3UJ4B4g” source=”youtube” width=”600″ height=”400″ autoplay=”no”]While trying to tackle the topic of cognitive linguistics plays off surprisingly well—the writer did more than just read the Wikipedia article—it attempts to work its other core themes, circularity and unity, into an otherwise bland and uninteresting personal drama about losing a child. At first the death of Banks’ daughter seems to function as a bit of backstory fluff, but later it becomes a key focus of the story and the core of the movie—the process of linguistic exploration and the tension built from paranoia of world militaries—begins to fall apart. There’s also an awkward disconnect between the second and third acts when Banks suddenly goes from having to use digital software to interpret the shapes being cast by the aliens, to being able to read them on her own. The aliens themselves likewise somehow figure out how to understand spoken English, while Banks had deliberately only attempted to teach the written language.
Oddly the most prevalent theme—at least once the prerequisite plot-twist comes along—is most reminiscent of Slaughterhouse Five in both its displaced and alienated (pun intended) protagonists, as well as their general themes of circularity. The film attempts, both through the metaphors of the aliens’ circular writing system and the recurring plot threads and flashbacks, to get the viewer into the headspace whereby its own central concept makes sense. The alien language, as explained by Banks, is formed as if starting from both the beginning and end of a concept then working one’s way to the center. For instance, one might write the beginning and end of a sentence simultaneously and with both hands, and work one’s way towards the core of the thought. It’s an occasionally obtuse concept, but the third act throws the viewer into almost an immersion course of the concept to better understand its application.
Noble efforts are to be commended for their own merit. If any of the linguistic mumbo-jumbo that enthusiasts—nerds—like myself appreciate sounds intriguing, then it’s certainly a decent Saturday-night movie to make one feel smart and enlightened, if one can tolerate some unnatural dialogue and boring characters.
