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Arrival: A short review (Spoilers)
Villeneuve is a unique director. His movies use bizarre settings or scenarios as a backdrop to tell intensely human and personal dramas.
In Bladerunner 2049 he evolves the 1982 movie's dystopian frame into its full aesthetic. Skyscraper mausoleums, home to living creatures with dead souls and dying creatures with living souls. The ruins of Vegas. A glimpse, briefly, into a potential uprising. All in service of a story where a nobody ensures that a somebody has final closure.
In Enemy, it is not clear, even by the end, whether the story takes place entirely inside the unreliable narrator's mind. Huge spiders roam the city, eventually invading the protagonist's very living room (or mind?).
While Villeneuve's unsettling aesthetic is at its peak in Dune I and II, I consider them two of his weaker movies. There are two characters in Herbert's Dune: the planet itself, and the directed inevitability of massed humanity. What is personal must be in service to this setting. Instead, Villeneuve's interpretation foregrounds individual agency.
Fortunately, Villeneuve has already directed his SciFi masterpiece in Arrival. The alien ships are massive ellipsoids hovering impossibly mere meters from the earth. The aliens themselves walk on tentacle appendages, grotesquely squid-like. The camera frequently takes a near-first-person view, with panicked and claustrophobic breathing emanating from all speakers (1). These moments of enclosed fear are juxtaposed against equally breathtaking cinematographic vistas. The slow panning as the helicopter approaches the alien ship with low-lying clouds roiling across the Montana prairie. A human hand reaching fingers up as the alien's tentacles stretch downward.
Amy Adams is perfectly cast. In 2016 she could pass for 30 or 45 or anywhere in between, key to the time-bending unfolding of the plot. She treats her character, Louise, much like Villeneuve treats the movie: with understated grace and moments of sublime. Louise's loneliness palpably exudes in the first third of the movie, before running an emotional gamut from fear, hope, acceptance, and finally transcendence.
The science is inaccurate (2), but Villeneuve perfectly captures the academic aesthetic.
The idea that language constrains and shapes our experience of reality is thoughtfully if subtly explored (3).
While there are nods to liberal sensibilities (when a general tells Louise she made short work of insurgent Farsi recordings, she retorts "you made short work of the insurgents"; a soldier turns rogue following a phone call with his inconsolable wife and listening to the in-universe stand-in for Alex Jones), Villeneuve rarely lets politics infect his storytelling.
This movie feels quasi-religious and transcendent (4) in its celebration of life and meaning in suffering and loss. Louise through her contact with the aliens is able to view her life outside of time, revealing memory-like sequences of her future. This future includes myriad happy moments with her daughter, but concludes with her daughter's devastating death from cancer. Arrival climaxes with Louise joyfully embracing this future despite knowing that it means the premature end of her only romantic relationship and the heartbreaking loss of her daughter. The time that she will have with her daughter is worth it all.
Last week's discussion on Down Syndrome prompted this post. How many parents who have Down syndrome children would trade those children for nothingness? How many, if they had perfect foresight, would still choose to have the child? Age begets wisdom, experience shapes us, and relationships become our great source of meaning. A couple choosing to abort their Down syndrome child are doing more than making an expedient choice. They are depriving themselves and their child of a rich tapestry of experience; one that is perhaps more challenging and painful, but also one that can and should be fulfilling. A life of short cuts is a life cut short; not in time but in meaning.
(1) Watch this on a big screen and with surround sound
(2) At one point a whiteboard displays the "top 10" most famous equations including Black Scholes...none of which would be relevant to alien first contact. It is also preposterous that we perceive time linearly solely due to our linear language.
(3) Yes, the fact that this is the "reason" behind Louise's ability to view her life outside of time is not "subtle", but this reveal is blink-and-miss-it: my guess is most viewers would simply associate her time-bending ability with prolonged exposure to the aliens.
(4) Villeneuve grew up Catholic
This is a false dichotomy, most who would abort a downs child would then go on to have a normal child. Not nothing. Everything in life have an opportunity cost.
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