SPOILER ALERT! I’m gonna tell you pretty much everything that happens in this film.
Thanksgiving weekend is a good time for movies, old and new. We saw Arrival two weeks ago, when it opened, and I started a review, but it was too early to give everything away. Now a lot of people have seen it and so it’s time for me to add my two cents. This review has two parts. The first explores the “aliens” plot, which is fantastic and worth the price of admission. However, I left the film feeling this really empty space in my stomach over what the film did not address about suffering. It kind of left us with a huge challenge and no way– within the context of the film– to address it.
But let me be clear– I love this film! It made me think and its framing of the alien encounter question in linguistics (how can we speak their language) was super compelling. I like to think and this film gave me a lot to think about. It’s deeply flawed, but also super cool.
I actually think Arrival is less about aliens than it is about our relationship to intelligence, particularly artificial intelligence. It reminded me more of Her and Ex Machina than Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At its heart it is a film about the nature of intelligence (and in some ways about the morality of a cool, perfected intelligence).
Arrival‘s premise is essentially this: language shapes the brain and the language or languages we know make us who we are. A superior, advanced, intelligent language, if we could learn it, could reshape our brains in a way that would make us kinder and more unified and also took us beyond the limits of the time continuum (our lives would no longer need to be linear).
The idea is explored through an alien encounter. Aliens arrive in giant, monolithic space ships that hover over 12 locations. A linguist, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is brought to the site in Montana to make contact with and try to figure out the purpose of the visit. She is joined in this task by a physicist, Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). The question is the very human question always posed: are the aliens’ intentions toward us good or evil? The question itself reveals how humans are shaped: we ask this basic question of all “others.” Are you here to befriend us or destroy us?
Think about this question in terms of immigrants and it’s even more disturbing. Nationalists around the world seem to assume the newest population of immigrants are threatening until they become like us. And the way we expect them to become like us is to immediately learn our language.
Around the world, at the 12 sites, humans are learning how to “read” the alien language. The peoples of the world won’t share their knowledge with each other, and are portrayed using some very American stereotypes. The Americans are ahead of the game in doing this work, and the Chinese and Russians want to blow the aliens out of the sky.
Finally, all 12 sites are given a message. The aliens have brought a gift– or maybe a weapon. Or maybe an advantage. Translation is as always imprecise. The play of these three words: weapon/advantage/gift is key in seeing how language shapes our brains and guides our expectations of “encounters,” especially with others– and these aliens are brilliantly “other.” If you choose “gift,” the intention of the aliens is good. If you choose “advantage,” you are guided by competition. If you choose “weapon,” you think the aliens are bad. The aliens are clear– they are giving this gift/advantage/weapon to humans in the hopes that the humans will use it in a way that will someday save them. They need help in the future from humans and so have traveled to deliver this thing. They deliver it in 12 pieces. The gift is their language which, once learned, will give Louise the ability to achieve world peace. But the 12 nations need to share to put the puzzle of the language together. Louise uses a little trick (only possible if she understands the language) to get the nations to work together. And yes, this is a crazy privileging of Americans as the best and smartest humans on earth.
But what is this knowledge embedded in the alien language? We are in the Biblical garden here. But it is not the ability to discern good and evil that Louise learns. The language works its magic to free Louise from the time continuum. Her life is no longer linear. She “knows” her experience in total. In fact, she’s begun “knowing it” as she’s learned the language, which we thought were flashbacks and couldn’t understand why they were causing her such panic and confusion. And that is where (just like in Genesis) a moral dilemma is expressed. And, unfortunately, where the film ends.
Louise’s knowledge, her reshaped brain, cannot save her daughter, who dies at an early age of “a rare disease” that looks like leukemia. Being free from the time continuum doesn’t mean she can live multiple lives– she still gets one. But she can make some choices because, she realizes over the course of the encounter, the daughter is the result of her marriage to Ian, which has not happened yet.
Knowledge does not make her immortal. It does not free Louise from suffering and death, from grief, from all the things that lie ahead in life. And that is unsettling. Should she not have given birth to the daughter, knowing how she would die? Should she turn away from Ian and marry someone else? Does she still have the free will to act differently?
Throughout the film, we have seen, in the grey skies of the Pacific Northwest, Louise’s grief. Her loneliness. Her struggle to move forward from her daughter’s death and her divorce from Ian (angry that she knew what was coming for their daughter and didn’t let him in on the knowledge or engage him in the decisions).
Playing with time is always terribly problematic. The way this film plays with time makes us question our happy ending. World peace! World peace! And Louise doesn’t keep the knowledge to herself– we see her teaching others the language and sharing the gift. But her “ending” is the isolation and grief we’ve already witnessed– and which we thought was her “beginning.” We thought somehow the romance with Ian (which we all saw coming) would rescue her from that terrible divorce and the grief over her child’s death, not be a major contributing factor to her depressed state.
Some have questioned whether she was selfish in having the child knowing she would suffer and die young. As someone acquainted with suffering, I think this is bad thinking. The goal of life is not to avoid suffering. Suffering has a place in life and especially in relationships. Life’s purpose is loving others, and suffering teaches us a lot about love.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t explore this idea. It gives us moments and a puzzle. It gives us a main character who is supposed to be the epitome of enlightenment, the keeper of the gift, and she is consumed by a kind of grief that is lacking in mercy and/or redemption.
In a way, that’s a problem with our addiction to and ultimate privileging of knowledge (science). It needs to be balanced with a spiritual dimension (or maybe some poetry?). Otherwise, we’re likely to be left with a huge, unsettling hole in our center.