I first saw a trailer for Arrival a few months ago and was very keen to watch it as soon as I
could, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLO4X6UI8OY.
Its release date was after the election so I knew it wouldn't contain any presidential
propaganda of the kind I've been talking about, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-american-jo-cox.html.
As always, I avoided reading any reviews until I'd seen the film myself so I
wouldn't be biased. I ended up going to see it with two of my
UFO/conspiracy/paranormal friends who were just as intrigued by it as I was. Last
Monday I travelled all the way to London 's
West End and bought tickets at a retro-themed cinema and
bar/restaurant near Leicester Square .
It was designed to look and feel like a 1920's picture palace, an effect that
was well thought out by its architects. Arrival
is a science fiction film about aliens unexpectedly and suddenly landing on
earth without invitation. It is by the Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and
based on a short story by Ted Chiang. The alien invasion has become a common
movie scenario and films of the genre vary enormously in technical quality and
intellectual content. Arrival is
unusual for the trope because I think it would appeal to people who might not
normally enjoy sci-fi. Anybody with an interest in language would probably like
the film because the central theme of the story is linguistics. The makers of
this film have thought long and hard; and done a lot of research on the
subject.
There is a single protagonist called Dr Louise Banks, played
by Amy Adams, who is one of the world's leading linguistics experts. When a
fleet of extraterrestrial spacecraft land on the earth she is recruited by the
government to help them decipher the language coming from the aliens inside
them who are trying to communicate with humans. The film makes one think about
how an intelligent extraterrestrial species would speak. Most science fiction
from the past gave little thought to this matter. Aliens tended to look like
ex-American footballers... mostly because that's who their actors were, with
blue beards and green eye-contacts who roar incoherencies about revenge being a
dish best served cold etc. Real extraterrestrials would have a completely
different psychology to us. They would look, communicate and act in ways that
might well make no sense to us. They might even be completely beyond our understanding.
Indeed research into alien abduction is revealing this very problem. The issues
raised in this film have a lot of relevance for astronomers in the SETI-
"Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence" programme and also people
who analyze crop circles. We don't need to go off-planet to realize this
either. Scientists involved in animal psychology studies say the same thing. In
fact anybody who has a dog will sometimes be mystified by the behaviour of
their pet. "Why is he doing that?" He knows because he's a dog; we're
not dogs so we don't. Obviously humans do things dogs cannot comprehend either.
Arrival brings up this vital point;
that translation is about more than just decoding language when dealing with a
different species. As that great
hospital porter... and occasional part-time philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein once
wrote: "If a lion could speak we
still could not understand him." He would have enjoyed Arrival. Different ways of speaking involve
different ways of thinking. This is why the powers-that-shouldn't-be pay so
much attention to language. They whittle and mould it into ways that suit them,
as George Orwell detailed in his book 1984.
There are other features of the film that show clever conceptualizing and a
very fertile imagination. It breaks from sci-fi norms in the nature of the
spacecraft. They are huge crescent-shaped vessels nicknamed "shells"
by the humans. They have a distinctly ceramic texture to them, as if they are carved
flying mountains. The aliens have clearly invented antigravity and not just in
the propulsion system of the vessel. The interior also has its own
gravitational environment. The outer door on the underside leads to a long vertical
corridor, also appearing to be made of stone. The humans who enter the vehicle
use a cherry-picker to hoist them inside, but once there they can walk because
of an artificial gravitational field at right angles to the earth's. Arrival also examines the concept of
time being non-linear. This is a complex subject and I did not understand this
element of the film completely, but it relates to Louise's memories of her past
and how they change as she learns more and more of the alien language. David
Icke has also explored the idea of "time loops" and even titled one
of his books Tales from the Time Loop.
The BBC TV series Doctor Who also sometimes
delves into this idea. Arrival is very vivid and uses similar techniques as
Paul Davids' Roswell
See here for more
information: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/chimps-sign-language.html.
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