BY ADAM M. SCHENCK
Denis Villeneuve is quickly showing himself as one of Hollywood’s masters of mood and film craft (he also directed “Sicario”).
“Arrival” covers well-worn sci-fi tropes like flashbacks to a dead daughter and the aliens’ gift to a humanity too foolhardy to accept it. Amy Adams illustrates how the problem of the American spirit doubles as the problem of the human condition.
The aliens appear in 12 vessels at different locations around the globe. The ships defy the rules of physics; the 1,000-foot-tall orbs float in the air, release no byproducts or radiation and control gravity within their walls. In all 12 places the governments of Earth install language experts to attempt communication with the “septapods”—gigantic seven-legged crawfish-like extraterrestrials—in awkward hourly mime-acts.
The septapods communicate verbally like whales, but their written language is comprised of floating ink circles. Most significantly, their language reconceives the passage of time similarly to the Buddhist concept of reincarnation: From a distant-enough view, past, present, and future meld into one.
The film asks, “If language limits how we conceive of things, could we not open the human mind to a new way of thinking with a new language?” Some critics have complained that “Arrival” gets too bogged down in its language-nerd ambitions, but for this English major hearing of the Sapir-Whorf Theorem brought back fond memories.
Rugged everyman actor Jeremy Renner plays the scientist teaming up with Amy Adams’ linguistics expert. The plot thickens as the great militaries of the world fear the threat not so much of the septapods, but the idea that the other nations could take advantage of the aliens’ tools.
As you may have already guessed, the extraterrestrials have formed their stratagem to unify humanity, not to divide it. To think that there could be a universal language that could overcome humanity’s fears, and even create mental pathways to open our understanding.
Reach Adam M. Schenck at [email protected].
