A MOVIE ABOUT ALIENS THAT WON’T LEAVE YOU
Villeneuve’s sci-fi film will make you ponder — and want to see it again
Klaatu Barada Nikto. Every science-fiction nerd knows the famous phrase from The Day the Earth Stood Still, and how it caused the robot Gort not to destroy our planet.
But imagine how fantastically difficult it would be to translate an extraterrestrial language from a standing start. We can’t even talk to whales and dolphins.
Arrival, the newest from Quebec director Denis Villeneuve (last years’s Sicario; next year’s Blade Runner 2049) is a thoughtful, even somewhat dry exploration of language and translation. (On the other hand, it caused me to tweet “I have seen something amazing” after my first time through the film.)
When a dozen alien spaceships arrive on Earth, humanity’s first priority is to figure out their intentions: friendly or nefarious?
Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams, down-to-earth as a film like this needs) must struggle with these questions. She works with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner, the perfect left brain to her right) and answers to Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), part of the military surrounding the Montana landing site.
Villeneuve is working from a screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the short fiction The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang — well worth a read, but only after you’ve seen the picture.
The people of Earth behave very much by the book. The U.S. camp is all helicopters and off-road vehicles, baggy field tents and HAZMAT suits. E.T. would feel right at home. When a military chopper arrives, landing lights ablaze, to collect Louise, it actually looks more like an alien ship than an earthly transport.
The aliens are, well, imagine a walking tree trunk with seven roots: a heptapod. The film’s score when they appear — by Villeneuve regular Johann Johannsonn of Iceland — sounds like a duet for whale and bassoon.
The aliens’ writing resembles a fractal pattern composed by a squid. And it represents ideas and concepts but not vocalizations: There is no way to read it aloud.
The movie makes much of the idea that how we experience the universe is in part conditioned by how we describe it. How you compare someone to a summer’s day depends on whether you use one word to mean both blue and green (as some ancient languages did) or two, or many.
Arrival may even change your perceptions of such apparent constants as time, family and cause and effect. Note the opening words of the film, spoken by Louise to her daughter: “I used to think this was the beginning of your story.”
We sense some family tragedy, but the film counters with an implicit question: Would knowing your child is going to die — whether through tragedy or time — change your decision to have her? Or, as one character says, “despite knowing the journey and where it leads ... embrace it and love every moment.”
And herein lies that ‘other hand’ earlier in this review: the human heart that beats within all good science fiction — for until the aliens actually land, all our stories are ultimately about ourselves. Louise is the best humanity has to offer — not perfect by any means, but fast (as in steady), slow to judge, resolute in decision.
Louise must deal with confusing messages. Are the aliens saying “use weapon” or “give tool”? And do they mean “please give us a tool” or “we’ll give you a tool”?
The answers, when they come, may leave you mind-boggled, as though you’d just been taught a new word for a shade between blue and green, and also seen that colour for the first time. It may leave you in tears — my first viewing was the nearest I’ve come in a long while. It will probably leave you wanting to see it again. But it will not leave you.