Arrival - 2016

I liked it. A lot. There is basically no action, it’s very slow, not even many words, but I liked it. it’s a complex story about feeling, understanding, communicating, and it left me with something. I kept thinking: I understand him, but I also understand her. Would I have done the same? Probably, yes.

The story: we meet Louise (Amy Adams) who has a child, raises her, and then loses her maybe to cancer. Then we learn that some aliens have arrived on Earth; well, twelve starships, just hovering in twelve different parts of the planet (USA of course, then Australia, China, Japan, Russia, UK, and also I think Venezuela, Sudan and… oh I can’t remember now :-/ )

A colonel (Forest Whitaker) comes to get her because he needs her help. She’s an expert linguistic, and he wants her to help them understand what they are saying. There she meets Ian (Jeremy Renner) who is a scientist, a theorist (like Sheldon, only nice, so make it Leonard). 

They are part of the team that will go inside the ship to meet with the aliens and try to establish communications. The same is happening in all the other Countries where the ships have arrived. 

Inside the ship, gravity is rather peculiar and they interact with two gigantic sort of octopus-like creature (octopus=octopods, so they call this race heptapods because they don’t have eight but seven ‘tentacles’) who don’t use words but sounds, as easy as talking to a whale, so Louise tries a different approach. She writes, to see if they have any kind of written language, and they do. They write by spreading ink from their tentacles into their thick air, where it draws a circle-sign that is their entire phrase. They don’t have a linear language but a circular one, no beginning and no end, but Louise and Ian work at it for months with the help of computers and slowly figure bits of it out. 

Thinking about their ‘non-linear ortography’, Ian wonders if that’s how they think too! 

He tells Louise that he’s been reading about “this idea that if you immerse yourself into a foreign language, that you can actually rewire your brain” - “the language you speak determines how you think and….” - “it affects how you see everything” then he adds “I’m curious, are you dreaming in their language?”.

At one point she says they gave her a message that she roughly translates as offering ‘weapon’, and it all goes crazy. She tries to explain that it may mean something different, that they need to ask them what they meant, but instead they start thinking that the aliens might be trying to offer weapons to turn them against each other; China understood the message as “use weapon” so they say they don’t trust these aliens that are “trying to divide us” and call for a UN meeting. They all cease communications, and every Country is left on its own. At least a couple of soldiers went crazy stupid and tried to blow the ship up using explosive, and I’m convinced that the aliens knew about it, and still talked to Louise and Ian (who went there to seek a clarification, knowing nothing about it) and at the last few seconds they tried to warn them of the danger and ultimately saved them by somehow pushing them back out (they got injured, but not too seriously). One left earlier, the other stayed to leave a big message for them and then to help. 

China gives the aliens an ultimatum, leave or be destroyed. Studying the last message, Ian finds out it’s only a part of a bigger message, 1/12, so each Country should put together their messages.

A Russian expert gets shot for divulging his message “there is no time, many become one”, and Louise insists they should stay and communicate with other, but they’ve been ordered to evacuate because after the bomb they fear the aliens might retaliate, but instead she goes to their ship and they send a pod for her. 

During all this, she seemed to me to act a bit strange; I mean, she made a big deal the first time she went through the experience, and I was like: after all you went through, you get scared for a couple of aliens? If I had lost my daughter I’d be like ‘I’ve been through the worst already, nothing scares me now’  and from time to time we saw bits of her life with Hannah, her daughter, as if remembering those moments or conversations could help her now.. but somehow it felt off and I didn’t see why at first. I can’t remember exactly when I understood about the child, but things started to make sense. 

While inside their ship, in their own atmosphere, with only one of them, Louise learn that the other is dying, and she asks him to give a message to the others. He tells her that she already has the weapon. He writes “we help humanity, in 3000 years we need humanity help”. Not yet able to understand, she asks him “who is this child?”, the little girl she keeps seeing - “Louise sees future”, and “weapon opens time”, and she finally understands. By learning their non linear language she started thinking their way, their non-linear way, and seeing bits of her future. She understands the image of the little girl’s drawing “mom and daddy talk to animals” with her and a man and a bird in a cage, like the one she always had during her visits to the aliens (like miners, of course, that’s why she stopped wearing those big things, the bird breathed fine).

We see it all with her: the book she’ll write on universal language about translating heptapod , when she’ll explain to her daughter that her father left because she told her something about the future, telling her that she made the wrong choice (because she knows the girl will die of some rare, unstoppable disease. When she gets back to the others, she realizes that now she can read their language, she understands that she sees time as they do, and she sees a celebration: 18 months from now, she’ll meet there General Shang and he’ll tell her that she changed his mind when she reached him on his private number; she says she doesn’t know it and she shows it to her, and also tells her what she told him on the phone, his wife’s dying words, so she now knows what she has to do. While the others prepare to evacuate she takes a satellite phone and calls that number and speaks to him in Chinese, repeating the words he said/will say to her. Shortly after that, every news channel reports that China is standing down and wants to share their information with the others. Now the aliens leave. Mission accomplished, Earth is on its way to unification (honestly, it’s easier to believe their chats with the aliens than this). 

We finally see that Hannah’s father will be Ian, but that’s no surprise at this point. In the present she hugs him saying “I forgot how good it felt to be held by you”, and we see that they’ll have a relationship, that she’ll say yes to his idea of having children, that they’ll be happy for a while, but we already know that he’ll leave when she’ll tell him what’s about to happen to the child. 

“Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and I welcome every moment of it”.

To the viewers to decide if they agree with him or with her. I understand his pain and how it might be hard to accept but I also understand her decision. She didn’t tell him sooner because she wanted the baby, and she wanted the baby anyway for all the moments she had with her and for all the love they shared. I can’t know, of course, but I don’t think that any parent who lost a child ever wished to have never had that child. 

About the movie, I also liked the fact that all the other Countries had their own experts and they all made progress.