by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was a movie I’d been waiting to
watch since I bought the Blu-Ray disc (this one did not come with a second disc containing a DVD version): Arrival, the quite moving and intense 2016 science-fiction
film from French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (incidentally his first
name is pronounced “Deh-NEE,” with the “s” being silent) based on a script by
Eric Heisserer which in turn started life as a short story by Ted Chiang called
Story of Your Life, which I’d
like to read sometime. (The film was first made under the title Story
of Your Life but preview audiences were
hostile towards that name, which led the producing companies to come up with
something that sounded more “science-fictiony.”) Arrival stars Amy Adams in a quite remarkable performance as
Louise Banks (though for some reason just about everyone else in the cast
pronounces her name “Luis,” as if she were a Latino male instead of an Anglo
female), who in the opening sequences we see with her daughter Hannah at their
beach home: we get an encapsulated version of Hannah’s childhood, with three
actresses playing her (Jadyn Malone at six, Abigail Pniowsky at eight and Julia
Scarlet Dan at 12), before she dies of cancer (our last glimpse of her is in
bed, bald, no doubt from the effects of chemo). Then — or at least we’re led to
believe it’s “then” (more on that
later) — Louise, a linguistics professor, notices that virtually nobody is in
the lecture theatre where she gives her main class, and the few people who
bothered to show up couldn’t be less interested in what she has to say. One of
the students asks if the classroom TV can be tuned into a news channel, and
when Louise does this she learns what’s got everyone else so excited: 12
mysterious spacecraft have landed on Earth. Well, they haven’t landed, actually; the aliens’ technology allows them to
have their craft hover a few feet above the ground of Earth, and they’ve sent
their ships to a varied set of Earth locales, including one in Montana (the
only one in the U.S.).
Louise is asked by Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker, an actor
whose entire career practically defines “ill-used” — his incandescent
performance as Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s Bird should have made him a major star and won him an
Academy Award, but neither happened and he spent a lot of the next two decades
directing Black-themed independent movies before finally winning the Oscar as
Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland) to take charge of communicating with the aliens, who clearly have some sort of language. Col. Weber picked her because
she’d been successful at a previous assignment for the U.S. military —
translating some Farsi videotapes by Iranian terrorists — but she protests that
she’d already known Farsi whereas decoding an alien language that may be the
product of a pattern of thought totally different from that of humans is going
to be a major challenge unlike anything she’s done before. While on the
assignment she meets and works with Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), and she seems
to be personally attracted to him as well even though he’s so diffident he’s
barely even there. (I can imagine
why Renner would want to take a part totally different from his star-making
turn as the crazy gung-ho unit commander in The Hurt Locker, but this was really overdoing it.) At first the crew handling the
visitations are allowed to go into the aliens’ spacecraft only in orange
haz-mat suits (I began to wonder if the aliens would think that’s what humans
looked like — with orange skin and windows over their faces), but at one point
Louise gets frustrated and takes her off despite all the warnings she’s getting
from Weber and his colleagues down at the base camp outside the landing site
that she risks contamination from alien bacteria or whatever. Eventually she
deciphers the aliens’ language and also gets to see what they look like:
they’re blob-like creatures that resemble earth octopi except they can walk and
survive on land (albeit without leaving any footprints behind) and they have
one fewer leg, which leads the earth crew to call them “heptapods” (Greek for
“seven-legged”). Louise figures out that heptapods write using a whole
different thought process from that they use when they speak, and she figures
out their written language — which is basically formed by spitting out clouds
of ink which resolve themselves into circles, but with various blotches and
tails that communicate their message. (Since each circular ideogram
communicates an entire word, phrase or sentence, their writing is closer to
Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters than anything based on an alphabet.)
Arrival is a fascinating movie, obviously aimed at competing
with previous “serious” science-fiction films like The Day the Earth
Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Russian Solaris (the first The Day the Earth Stood Still and 2001
are actually referenced in the movie, as is E.T., though through visual rather than verbal quotes),
and it’s a moving tale of a part of human-alien interaction most science-fiction
films either ignore completely or slough off. (In The Day the Earth
Stood Still and quite a few other films
that followed its model, we were told that the aliens had monitored Earth’s
radio and TV broadcasts and from those had taught themselves English and other
earth languages. In other movies, including the “dicto-robitary” from Plan
Nine from Outer Space, authors posited the
existence of a universal translating machine, one of those dorky sci-fi
concepts a speaker at a previous ConDor convention said would be scientifically
impossible.) Arrival is a
fascinating film not only because the central concept is compelling but because
Villeneuve directs it in a slow-paced way with surprisingly little suspense and
almost no action — a far cry from the shoot-’em-up space operas we get in most
science-fiction films today. He’s clearly a master of atmosphere, and Arrival contains shots of almost chilling physical beauty
despite the overcast weather through most of the film (in the making-of
featurette he said he wanted it to look like the view from a school bus on a
rainy Tuesday, with a whole bunch of restive kids bracing themselves for a
lousy day). He’s helped by a script by Heisserer that totally avoids
over-explaining things, a common trap for science-fiction writers. We never
learn for sure just who the aliens are, how their society functions back home,
what their motivation for coming to earth was or whether they’ve accomplished
it when they leave — and the film is more powerful than it would be if all that
were explained to us. As a joke
the humans name the two aliens they see “Abbott” and “Costello” (which one
imdb.com contributor suggested was a reference to the “Who’s on First?” comedy
routine and other gags the original Abbott and Costello did based on horrendous
miscommunications between the two), and though eventually Louise and her crew
manage to figure out how to read the aliens’ writing and duplicate it so they
can converse, the aliens’ responses are infuriatingly gnomic. “Get weapon,” one
of them reads, which causes the military people in charge of the first contacts
around the world to freak out and decide the alien ships are the vanguard of an
invasion force and therefore we should close down all communication and just
shoot at them.
In a lot of respects Arrival is the kind of movie I like — it sets up an unusual
premise, though one so obvious you think, “How come that never occurred to me
before?,” and it’s skillfully acted and directed (though Amy Adams didn’t get
the Academy Award nomination she deserved for her performance — at least some
commentators believe there was a last-minute surge for Meryl Streep in Florence
Foster Jenkins after her anti-Trump
comments at the Golden Globes and thus Streep got her 20th Oscar
nomination and shut out a lot of younger and equally deserving performers,
including Adams) — but it had one aspect that really rankled me. The conceit
behind the story is that the aliens don’t think in linear patterns and have no
conception of time as a one-way continuum of past-present-future. O.K., but if
they have no linear thought patterns, how did they build spaceships in the
first place? Don’t you have to
think in linear terms to be able to develop technology at all? And what’s even
worse, the filmmakers use this conceit to set up a truly revolting surprise
ending à la The Sixth Sense, in
which [spoiler alert!] we’re told
at the end that what we thought was a prologue and periodic flashbacks showing
Louise with her daughter Hannah were actually events that occurred to her after the alien visitation, and that Jeremy Renner’s
character, whom she met during the visitation, was Hannah’s father. Villeneuve
says during his interview for the making-of featurette that he was really
attracted to this part of the story and in particular whether someone would
willingly enter into a romantic relationship even while knowing in advance it
was going to end badly — her lover would leave her and then their child would
die of cancer. I really don’t like non-linear stories — I remember reviewing Olivier
Assayas’ demonlover and thinking
it was one of the worst films I’d ever seen precisely because Assayas got on his post-modern soap box and actively
discouraged his audiences from
connecting any of the film’s events to each other — though I gave a pass to Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind because it
was about two people whose memories had been largely erased, and therefore it had to be non-linear to depict how the leads were
recovering their senses of themselves and each other from the shards of memory
that came to them in random order. I don’t particularly like non-linear movies
in general, and I like even less the implied propaganda of this film that it’s better to think non-linearly than linearly — and that
aspect of Arrival really put me
off even though overall I quite liked the film and thought it was ambitious and
largely successful in its attempt to be a human drama and not just another
high-tech shoot-’em-up.
