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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
Arrival at this point is a movie that I like more because it introduced me to the source material than for the movie in itself. Yes, the direction is good, but they way they butchered the original concept is inexcusable (thank you screenwriter Eric Heisserer).
In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time. Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will. The aliens came to earth not because "they know that some day we will help them or something" but simply as explorers. There is no big action scene where the protagonist averts a catastrophe by using her knowledge of the future.
The part about her daughter (it's a daughter in the book) underscores this. She dies not of an incurable illness but of an easily preventable rock climbing incident. Except that she can't easily prevent it because that's just how it happens, just like you can't change the past.
The movie muddles all this, probably to make the big action climax. I imagine somebody at some point figured out it would be callous for the protagonist not to warn her daughter that she's going to slip and die. Maybe they didn't even get the concept of the original story, in between the lines of coke they were doing. But it doesn't solve anything, if she can consciousness timetravel why not have a child the month before, or the one after. Why specifically pick the one born with an incurable illness? Yes they would be timetravel aborting him but no more so than all the other dozens of children they are timetravel aborting instead.
The original work is very interesting although I’m not sure it’s very good. It raises some interesting philosophical questions. The story is probably the best possible story you could write about a form of pseudo-precognition in hindsight that makes immediate, near-term sense to a reader.
But its deliberate ambiguities exist more to paper over the questions than to answer them. Gwern presents the most plausible explanation which is that nothing physically / cosmologically interesting is going on, the protagonist is basically just ‘reflecting’ on her life, in the standard past tense, in a kind of holistic way enabled by the alien language. But that also makes the story a lot less interesting.
I don’t think it even does this. I think it just lets you view your life, in hindsight, in a way that projects memories of the future you actually experienced (in normal linear time, you’re old now) onto your younger self.
I'm not even sure there is any difference between those explanations but still:
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