Arrival (2016)
As always, spoilers ahead.
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival feels very much in line with his previous two films, Enemy and Sicario. Each film is centred around a high concept idea, but that idea only serves as a backdrop to the intensely personal human drama that the main character is thrust into. Considering that Independence Day came out earlier in the year, it’s not hard to see how one could easily screw up an alien invasion film.
There’s technically one “combat” scene which we never see, framed by the movie’s single, muted explosion. It’s definitely not the bombastic action fare that you would expect from a movie about aliens coming to Earth unannounced. By comparison, even Sicario is more pulse pounding than Arrival.
At its heart, this is a science fiction film about communication. Yes, the humans and Louise Banks have to communicate with the mysterious Heptopods, but we also get glimpses at how communication is integral to humanity as well. On a small scale, we see this through Louise’s family drama as she “remembers” the life she has with her daughter and husband, and on a macro scale we see this through the looming figure of the Chinese general who threatens to destroy the aliens out of fear and ignorance.
For the most part, the film does succeed in telling us what we probably already know — the moral of the lesson is that we should learn to open up and communicate with each other for our mutual benefit, where it is with mysterious alien creatures, a seemingly evil Chinese General, or our family members. Someone compared the film to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, which has a similar premise in that Captain Picard is forced to learn to communicate with an alien in order to establish diplomatic relations and also imparts a similar lesson.
My minor criticism of the film would be levied at the underlying “twist” that is revealed at the end of the film. It’s not enough that Louise learns to communicate with the Heptapods, but learning their language allows her to understand time in a non-linear fashion. Yes, the alien language essentially allows Louise to be a time traveller, a key point which is integral to the dramatic climax of the film.
On the one hand, I liked that it subverted what we assume is her backstory — the film opens with a short montage that begins with Louise giving birth to her daughter and ends with Louise watching her daughter die. The audience, with no other information, simply assumes that this montage is set before the actual events of the film and seemingly provides some context for the decisions that she makes throughout the film. Given how recent science fiction films have used children in a similar manner, Gravity (in a very tertiary level) and Interstellar, it’s easy to just see Louise’s daughter as another plot device.
By the end of the film, however, we learn that these glimpses of her daughter’s life that we are exposed to actually happen after the events of the film. Since Louise is able to experience time in a completely non-linear fashion (presumably beginning at the point where she learned the language), the film shows her “remembering” events that have yet to happen. I don’t know if it necessarily changes anything about how her daughter is actually used in the film as a plot device, but at the very least it’s used effectively to sell the time travel premise.
However, while I think it’s fairly effective when used to convey Louise’s personal story, the film bludgeons you with the time travel premise when it comes to resolving the “Chinese problem” that we see throughout the film. Just as the Chinese General is about to attack one of the alien ships, Louise gets a vision of a party in the future where she meets the General. We get the impression that the conflict has been resolved peacefully, and the General then proceeds to tell her that she was single-handedly responsible for stopping a global catastrophe by calling him and telling him something that only his wife would know. Louise uses this information from the future to call the General in the past, stopping the Chinese from attacking the aliens.
It’s a sequence that bludgeons the audience with its time travel premise as much as the ending of Interstellar and leaves nothing to the imagination or up for interpretation. It makes the symbolism of the alien language literally being a series of circles a bit laughable, because I can’t help but think of the memetic “time is a flat circle” line from True Detective. Add to the fact that Louise’s daughter’s name is Hannah, which the film gleefully reveals to the audience is a palindrome, and suddenly even Louise’s relationship with her daughter becomes heavy-handed in trying to get the audience to understand how time travel works in this universe.
I don’t want to say that the time travel gimmick irreparably mars the film. I think the way that the story is told, in terms of showing a character struggle to learn to talk with an alien species, is as engaging as watching a man deal with discovering an identical twin or a woman deal with the reality of Mexican cartels. Villeneuve’s touch is thoughtful and considered, allowing you to inhabit Louise’s under-saturated and claustrophobic point of view. But if you’re a science fiction fan who is tired of time travel, then this film is not going to do you any favours.
Perhaps the only noteworthy criticism of the film that I have comes from the very awkward “science montage” that happens in the middle of the film. Suddenly, the other character in the film — Ian Donnelly — begins to narrate a sequence that shows us how Louise learns to communicate with the aliens. In Star Trek/science fiction terms, it’s the technobabble that writers just want to get past because they don’t actually find the science all that interesting to write about. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, except that the sudden change in point of view is quite jarring, and we are never in Donnelly’s head ever again.
I’m sure it didn’t help that I went into the film expecting one of the greatest science fiction stories ever put on celluloid, which is how it was sold by some of the reviewers that put the film on my radar. But pedestrian time travel story aside, it’s definitely one of the more interesting science fiction films that I’ve seen in recent years. It has the intimacy of Ex Machina or Her, but with the grander ambition of Interstellar, and it’s a film that I certainly don’t regret watching. Incidentally, it at least makes me somewhat interested in the upcoming Blade Runner sequel. If nothing else, Villeneuve should give us an interesting film to look at.
(Personal aside — Not that I wish him any harm, but I think I’m tired of seeing Tzi Ma be the generic old Chinese guy that you cast in everything because you can’t think of any other Chinese-American actors. It was a problem with James Hong many years ago, and I have to believe that you can find an older male actor who can speak English and Mandarin much easier in 2016 than you could even in 2006.)
