Arrival (2016) Review
The movie Arrival has been on my watch list since it came out and I was glad to see I would have the opportunity to see it. The movie overall was enjoyable. The cinematic and scientific aspects were clearly at the forefront of importance in this film as half of it seems like a scene out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the rest seems like a linguistics class lecture. The two tones work well together as the film presents a new angle on both simultaneously. The pacing of the film suffered slightly due to the mass amounts of information being explained throughout, but that information to the plot and the thematic presentation of the film was important later on. The ending would have left viewers in complete confusion without the breakdowns of the language and linguistic tools and studies. Outside of this, however, I really enjoyed this film and understand the poignant nature of such a film in an English class.
The concept of seeing your whole life is fascinating. Knowing every moment, in my opinion, would make life seem like a prison. Despite any positive or negative elements in your life, you will always know what’s going to happen next. Imagine the frustration if someone were to come in and spoil every movie you ever see for the rest of your life just ten minutes before the big finale, when you’re at your peak investment and can’t wait for a conclusion. That lack of mystery would cause myself to lose focus on the moment and wander back and forth over everything constantly. The entrapment would only be being able to physically witness the single moment while everything else is being played back. Overall, I would not like this. Maybe before death such a viewing would be interesting to see what choices I had made, but for a daily existence, it sounds terrible.
Time in this film is treated the same way language is in this film. For the aliens, language and time are tools that were transcended by them many years earlier, while for us, we both struggle to share a single language on Earth and have no grasp of time in the slightest, outside of crude measurement. The alien’s advancements with time and language express just how small we are as a race of humans in comparison to the rest of the universe around us. Perhaps there aren’t any aliens out in space as knowledgeable as these, but with or without, we are scratching the surface of our reality. Events occur that still baffle the highest scientific minds every day. Language is a barrier we probably will face for all of time. Time is just a concept rather than any sort of controllable tool. This film points out our place in the universe in a way that starts by suggesting the aliens are simpler than us by having a less complex language and builds up to that language being a way to bend a concept of our reality we have no control of at all.
Memories are void to the aliens and, eventually, to Louise. If you could witness every moment all at once, then could you even form memories? The whole story is laid out for you from day one of understanding the alien language, so since you know what has and will happen already, then can any actual memories form during that? If so, they would most likely be overlapped by the constant knowledge of the events that would no doubt be clearer than the memories themselves. In the perspective of this film’s view on normal human memories, I believe the main message focused on that would be that they are a doorway to something bigger. The idea that the alien’s language being an ultimate weapon of sorts means that memories are a key part of being human. Without the language, memories are all you have of the past, so they should be treated as precious.
The alien’s perspective of life on earth is not explicitly stated, however, we can assume that since they offer us something they use passively in their daily lives as an ultimate weapon of sorts, we would be perceived as somewhat less than them. The aliens seem peaceful and more on a journey to share knowledge because of their wisdom that malevolence wouldn’t strike me personally as a characteristic for the aliens to have. The movie uses the aliens to express a feeling of humans as weak, or possibly, just scratching the surface of their potential. I believe the writer or creator of the film’s main idea may feel like an alien himself in a world that he doesn’t fully understand, not because he can’t grasp it, but because it seems so painfully simple for a human to become more despite their not doing so that he feels almost alone. I believe the aliens were the soapbox for the person that feels this way, and the film was the speech. If he could express to others how he feels alone in the way he does, then perhaps others like him would reach out to such concepts as well. This film should be looked at as a sort of judgement of the human race where we are now in our history somewhere lower than this person would want us to be.
