Every so often, a film/book/television programme/advert is released and, coincidentally, its themes and messages chime with whatever is going on in the world. John Lewis, in an attempt to make a nice advert about some trampolining animals, accidentally created a message analogous to the Trump/Clinton presidential campaign. Sometimes film makers (or people creating their own different kinds of art) are a little more prescient and what they portray comes to pass in some way (example: https://www.theguardian.com/
Arrival is a film I saw less than a week after the unfolding horror of Donald Trump becoming President-Elect of the United States. And although its themes and messages are entirely coincidental, they resonate particularly because of global events.
Basic plot: Spaceships appear over 12 cities across the world. They just hang there. But once every 18 hours, a small hatch opens and access is granted to whatever is inside. Amy Adams (through means that are more plausible in the film) is an expert linguist and is recruited by the military to come and help them make sense of what’s going on. They recruit Jeremy Renner too, for good measure, because he’s a theoretical physicist. The film becomes an interesting debate on how we communicate in the absence of a common language.
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| It takes a long time for Amy Adams to work out that this is the sign for "dancer". |
Secondarily, it is important to remember that there are 12 of these spaceships. One in North Korea, one in China, one in England (in Devon, for some reason) etc. Everyone dealing with this unfolding situation in very different ways. What do we do? Try to talk to whoever’s in the spaceship? Blow the spaceship up? Try to blow everyone else’s spaceships up? So there’s also interesting (and timely) discussions about the importance of continuing to talk to the people facing the same situation as us and not just reacting to whatever we initially see and think. Fear makes us irrational, panicky and reactive. Amy Adams, at one point, translates the word "weapon". Panic instantly ensues, despite her protestations that they could mean "tool", or the word could be a question. Stay calm, everyone. We fear change. We fear the unknown. We fear new things. Should we? Or should we wait until there's something to actually panic about?
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| Yeah, fair enough. Panic... |
The third (and no less significant) theme is that of language. The film argues that the language we use shapes our thinking. China (I think) try to communicate with their spaceship in terms of Mah-jong – their language is subsequently about winning and losing, victory and defeat. A variation of Maslow’s Law of the Instrument is noted – “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. What is our current language saying about us? What does your vocabulary say about you?
So, lots of things to think about.
This is a film that has stayed with me, and I find myself pondering it and it's ramifications. Here are some other thoughts:
1. Brains are amazing. Obviously. The first time I watched The Sixth Sense, I did not get "The Twist". Despite all the clues being there that Bruce Willis's character was dead. Deceased. Pining for the fjords. The first time I realised this was during the scene where his wife (Olivia Williams) is asleep in front of their wedding video, and she turns over, and Bruce's wedding ring drops off the sofa and rolls towards him and he realises he's not wearing a wedding ring. At that point, my brain instantly pieced together all the bits of information and the thought "HE'S A GHOST" popped, unbidden, into my head. "Where did that thought come from?" wondered a different part of my head. (Which in itself is strange - how can the brain trick itself? That's bizarre!). Somewhere in the empty cavern of my mind, little cogs had been whirring away, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. And gave me the logical conclusion before I had consciously processed it. Of course I know that the brain in constantly doing that, but it was one of the very few times I was very aware of it. That I wasn't in control of some of my thinking. And that's odd.
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| This in itself shouldn't mean that much. And yet... |
I mention this, because there's a similar experience in this film. Where what you're looking at suddenly resolves itself and you realise that you're looking at something else, like a kind of brain optical illusion. This is not quite the film you think it is.
2. Thank goodness for the mind meld. Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner were making great progress with the aliens, trying to understand the strange inky blotches they created and communicate in response. But you wouldn't need to be conveying anything of great urgency:
Aliens: THERE'S A MASSIVE ASTEROID HURTLING TOWARDS EARTH AND YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE
Amy Adams: Hold on, this will take a week to translate...
Aliens: ARGH! Come here and let me mind meld your face...it'll be easier. Screw this "learning other languages" malarkey...
There's a lot to think about in this film, and it's worth seeing and worth paying attention to. It draws on Interstellar, but takes half the time and is twice as interesting. There's hints of Aliens, Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and surprisingly, Up. It's an interesting foray into sci-fi for director Denis Villeneuve, whose next project is the new Blade Runner sequel. I hope that by the time it comes out, we have not watched attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Or anywhere else for that matter.
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