Jeremy’s Tophunder №84: Arrival

8 min readJun 5, 2020

The biggest and most obvious difference between Arrival and seemingly every other movie that involves aliens coming to Earth that we’ve seen in the last 30 years is that these aliens aren’t here to murder all of us.

I think that’s one of the reasons I like it so much. We’ve been programmed so strongly by other movies to believe that aliens are threats that the first time I saw it, I kept waiting for the shooting to start. When it never did, I slowly came to realize that this was a totally different type of first contact movie.

More than anything, Arrival is about connection. Although we only really see two of the aliens and the humans they interact with, we hear about how other countries are attempting to communicate with them. It’s more than just about language — we hear that the Chinese communicators are teaching the aliens to play mahjong, and the aliens that land in China develop a more competitive style of communication.

One of the key facets of the movie is based on an idea known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or more generally, linguistic relativity. The idea is basically that the structure of a language will tangibly alter the brain functioning, cognition, and world view of those who speak it fluently. It was a popular idea at the start of the 20th century before being largely dismissed by experts after World War II, but has been re-examined in a more positive light over the last 30 years or so.

The hypothesis is hinted at with the plot point about the aliens learning mahjong. Amy Adams’ character (Louise Banks) develops a shared vocabulary with the aliens in Montana, eventually reaching the point where she can ask why they have come to Earth. The aliens in Montana say “offer weapon,” possibly because most of their interaction with humans so far have been overseen by the military. The Chinese government, however, when asking similar questions to the aliens, interpret the answer as “use weapon,” possibly explained by the competitive game that they’ve been using as a framework for all communication. Banks, however, points out that “weapon” could just as easily mean “tool,” but the aliens haven’t developed that vocabulary yet, as “tool” is a word with an implied amount of cooperation, but most of their interactions with the humans have been vaguely adversarial.

It becomes even more apparent later, as Louise becomes more proficient in the alien’s language, and she starts to experience an altered perception of time. The “weapon” the aliens referenced is their language. Those who understand it perceive time as they do — as a non-linear dimension that can be traversed. Not to spoil any key elements, but it’s around this time in the movie that we, the audience, realizes that parts of the first hour of the movie were shown out-of-sequence without us realizing. It’s a great twist that you don’t really see coming.

Meanwhile, the core of this hypothesis is partially mirrored by the characters themselves, even the ones that all speak the same “language.” The four central characters (Louise, played by Adams; physicist Ian Donnelly, played by Jeremy Renner; Army Colonel Weber, played by Forest Whitaker; and CIA Agent Halpern, played by Michael Stuhlbarg) all speak English, but their motivations are all painted very differently by their backgrounds, or more specifically, the way they use language.

On one end of the spectrum is Halpern. As a CIA agent, he operates under the assumption that any information they have is an asset that other nations don’t, and is wary of giving any information to the aliens that could be used against humankind (or, more specifically, the United States). His job is to be the gatekeeper. The door can only open wide enough to see what is on the other side. He has one question that he wants an answer to, and doesn’t care about the (from his perspective) dog-and-pony show that Louise and Ian are putting on. As an intelligence agent, he assumes that when the aliens say “offer weapon,” they mean it as a threat. At one point, Louise and Whitaker share an exchange, “If all I give you is a hammer — ” “ — Everything looks like a nail.” At the time, they’re referring to how the Chinese are interacting with their aliens, but it’s equally true of Halpern.

Louise and Ian, on the other hand, are academics — they don’t have one big question, they have 500 smaller questions. Their goal is to gain as much information as they can, and then use all of that information to paint their decision-making. Partially because of their broad range of curiosity, they allow for a broad range of possible meanings with everything the aliens say. Everyone around them interprets the alien messages literally, because, if those aliens are technologically sophisticated enough to travel through space and arrive on Earth, they must be intellectually sophisticated enough to communicate their intentions clearly. Louise and Ian are the only ones who seem to see through that false equivalency. They’re the opposite of gatekeepers. They want to throw the doors open and gather up all the information they can.

Weber is a military officer — his goal is to be efficient, finding out what the aliens want as soon as possible, and then acting on that information. He wants to have as much control over the operation as possible, because he has people to answer to. He’s the character that’s the closest to the middle — he gives latitude to Louise in her approach towards communicating with the aliens, but he insists on approving each day’s plans ahead of time. He’s not a gatekeeper, but he works for them. He’s curious, but cautious.

As the Captain in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke so famously said, “what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” Louise and Ian have almost as hard a time communicating effectively with Halpern and Weber as they do with the aliens. And Halpern and Weber have just about no prayer of effectively interpreting what the aliens say, because they’re too blinded by their own biases.

Arrival’s core message is that you can’t have true communication without a shared understanding of what you’re trying to talk about. Louise couldn’t ask the aliens why they’re here until she was confident that they would even understand the question, and explained as such in a beautifully simple way twice in one four-minute stretch.

It’s one of Amy Adams’ best performances, and maybe my favorite. Adams is one of my favorite actresses, and while she’s been highly decorated with various awards (6 Oscar nominations, 7 BAFTA nominations, 9 Golden Globe nominations and 2 wins), she somehow still seems to fly under the radar in any conversation of best actresses of the last 15 years or so.

Arrival is directed by Denis Villeneuve, one of my favorites working today. He’s also known for directing Sicario and Prisoners, two tremendous movies that didn’t end up making my list. Prisoners, in particular, is one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last 10 years, but it’s just so emotionally draining that I’ve never been able to bring myself to re-watch it. All of Villeneuve’s films are remarkable, but the reason I love Arrival so much is because it has a starkly different tone than the others. Prisoners and Sicario both have a very cynical view of people and how they respond in high-stress environments. Arrival certainly has some cynicism, but for the most part, the story is told through the eyes of Amy Adams, who very clearly is interest in learning for learning’s sake, not with some ulterior motive.

More than that, though, it’s a science fiction movie that is driven by plot and intricate subtleties, rather than action and adventure and high-concept ideas. It subverts your expectations just barely enough to allow the movie to become more interesting than you thought it would be. I certainly wasn’t expecting a Christopher Nolan-style action thriller within the Sci-Fi universe, but I certainly was expecting more action than I ended up getting. But looking back on it now, I’m glad I didn’t get it, and I actually like the movie more because of it. It’s a modern look on the Fear of the Other — our primary fear isn’t our own physical safety, it’s more nuanced and layered than that. It’s a fear of change, a fear of the unknown. Layered into the movie is an interesting look at the debate over immigration, just with “illegal aliens” replaced by extraterrestrial ones. I’m not sure if any of that was intentional, or just an unavoidable coincidence given the nature of the movie, but that’s just one more lens through which to interpret it.

I love movies with aliens, I love movies that mess around with narrative structure and time itself, and I love a lot of the people involved in this movie. It’s another one of those movies that I would have claimed to be in my Top 25 or 30 until I realized I had 75 movies in my Top 25. It was one of the harder movies to keep pushing down the list, because I’d put it at or near the top of the list for best science fiction movies of the decade. That’s the nature of the project, though. Arrival is a movie I love, and it’s a movie I think is great, but it’s somehow only my 84th-favorite movie. I guess I just love a lot of movies.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring