ARRIVAL REVIEW | BACKGROUND & SETTING
Arrival is a mesmerizing sci-fi thriller movie delivered in an exotic world. The visual world served as an platform bridging mankind and alien civilization. It’s thrilling when the biggest threat to humanity are not the aliens but humanity itself.
In the movie, it occurred by the scenes of time travelling between future and present. Dr Louis Banks (Amy Adams), linguistics who became eventually able to interpret the language of the apparent aliens . In her world, Louise is living out precognitive fragment moments of her own future. The movie occurred at the location of Montana , where the mysterious spacecraft float off the glade. The background goes with the eye-catching view of rolling fog surround the mystic hills and glade. It turned to be a contrast to the view when the dark charcoal oval shape spaceship appeared in the whitish background.
The interior of the ship can considered with Less Is More, there is no need for futuristic design like other alien movies. The spacecraft comes with simple polished stone like surface. At the end of the tunnel, there would be bring light to guide them to the corridor. Somehow, it creates mixed emotions of danger and fascination. The contrast and opposition create structure then. Meanwhile, when everything is so quite besides the bird chipping sound when they exploring to the tunnel, the song 'nananana na na na nananana' which were built on mostly vowels with no inherent meaning and tempo, but it sounds almost like a language that is in a stage of slowly forming.
The society inside appeared to be mostly military army and nation leaders as they are so feared the extra-terrestial beings. But a problem soon becomes apparent with distribution of power: Who speaks for the Earth? What happens if one nation makes an hasty move? It then proves to be the biggest threat to humanity itself when all the nations turned off communication and knowledge sharing networks.
Still, the challenge of this world in the Arrival are humanity itself. It challenges the nation leaders who aware of the distribution of power and the fallout rogue soldiers’ fear who took initiative to the implantation of bomb at the spacecraft. The alien doesn’t seem like crisis compared to human, as it preferred to save Ian and Louise before they even realized the bomb exploded by pushing them out of the spacecraft and closed the door. Sarcastically, the soldiers don’t really care if Ian and Louise die since they are sympathetic to the aliens, letting them to go ahead on the ship. With the military personnel supporting the bomb operation becoming wildly agitated by talk radio and talk shows had fluctuated the emotion of rogue soldiers. This is shown in the scene where family members are worried about their partner who are responsible to protect their nation.
The language itself either the human languages or extra-terrestrial beings language, are both arts. For aliens, they consider it as a weapon to cross the barrier of three thousand years as they’ve foreseen they’ll need the help from human. It’s crucial for Louise to interpret the language of alien with circle-like pattern to communicate and understand the purpose of their arrival. Louise has effectively had her mind rewired to speak the limitless language of the aliens and break the human boundaries of time. Therefore, she’s the Heptapod’s only hope. We might intuitively ‘feel’ tge emotion, but without the word to describe it we’re inclined to lump the emotion in with another under the same heading. Once we develop the linguistic term of it, though, we can describe it and feel it as distinct from other shades of adjacent emotions. It is really fascinating by the sentence of the alien language with a circle-like pattern to represent their meanings. It totally changed the view of our perceptions on how sentences or words would look like.
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In the end of the movie, humans live peacefully in earth with the gift from the aliens - language. Louise, she herself can foresee the future precognitive, she chooses to embrace the changes life for all of its countless victories and losses.