“ARRIVAL” (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) - Our Film Review

“Arrival” is all you can ask to Cinema and much more: great script and sublime director, music, sound design, mise-en-scène, actors and photography just to name out what we can immediately see, hear and feel during the film. And for anyone with a serious and intellectually-rigorous interest in UAPs it has much more to offer. There are no flying saucers, Area 51, Men in Black and secret government agencies so, if that’s what you are expecting to see you may be disappointed.

Like all great stories “Arrival” offers multiple layers of meaning and storytelling.

First of all, it is a universal and timeless plot since it narrates the story of each of us: a story of pure love, suffering, birth and death, a story that we lived, we are living or we will live someday.

It is not a coincidence that the inspiration for the film was a 1998 short story by author Ted Chiang titled “Story of Your Life”.

It goes without saying that you don’t need to be a sci-fi enthusiast to enjoy the film; it will speak to you no matter what your favorite genre is.

Then, there is the obvious story of the “moment of contact” between humanity and an alien species with all that comes with it: fear, hope, opposite emotions, fascination and rejection, intolerance and acceptance, trust and suspicion.

Both stories are narrated in an exquisite way, both (audio)visually and from an acting point of view.

If “Arrival” was “just” that, it would already deserve its own place in the list of the best films ever made.

But the more you dig the more you are going to find.

There’s another, much more important story that filmmaker Denis Villenueve wants to tell us: what is language?

Everybody would feel pretty confident to answer this “simple” question in a matter of seconds but are we really aware of what language ultimately is?

In “Arrival” language is the supreme maker of the very fabric of our reality.

Spacetime is created by language itself. Therefore gravity is created by language.

What? What does this even mean? In order to find it out we need to take a step back and, first of all, summarize the synopsis of the film: 12 extraterrestrial spaceships show up in 12 major countries and hover over them, completely silent, with no apparent intention to leave or to attack.

US military hires a team of scientists led by Louise Banks, a linguist, and by physicist Ian Donnelly. They are asked to translate what it’s believed to be a message from the aliens and decipher their language in order to be able to communicate with them and understand their motives and intentions. All other countries are doing the same with their own scientists.

Louise and Ian enter the spacecraft multiple times to meet the aliens of whom we apparently see the extremities only, suggesting that the beings may be much bigger. In the film the beings are called heptapods and they looks like cephalopods. We get to meet only “2” of them and the scientists gave them the nicknames “Abbott and Costello”, like the characters of the famous American comedy duo, which is, by itself, a further nod at the paradoxical nature of (our) language, whose result is the Beckett-ian and inevitable failure of communication and the creation of a parallel, artificial world. "Who's on First?" is a brilliant comedy routine made famous by the comic duo.

Below the transcription of the first part of the sketch:

(Lou Costello is considering becoming a ballplayer. But Abbott wants to make sure he knows what he’s getting into.)

Abbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names.

Costello: Funny names?

Abbott: Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the St. Louis Team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I don’t know is on third—

Costello: That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.

Abbott: I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I don’t know is on third.

Costello: You know the fellow names?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Well, then who’s playing first?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: I mean the fellow’s name on first base.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The fellow playin’ first base.

Abbott: Who

Costello: The guy on first base.

Abbott: Who is on first.

Costello: Well, what are you asking me for?

Abbott: I’m not asking you— I’m telling you. Who is on first.

Costello: I’m asking you—who’s on first?

Abbott: That’s the man’s name!

Costello: That’s who’s name?

Abbott: Yes

__

Going back to “Arrival”, our Abbott and Costello use a language of pictograms, both mathematical and pictorial in appearance with lots of evolving, circle-like symbols.

Louise works hard to decipher the language and meanwhile she starts to have peculiar and disturbing visions about a child of her she has never had who got cancer and eventually dies.

She gradually realizes that no individual country is gonna be able to decipher the language alone since the message is spread among the 12 ships. Therefore, global cooperation must be adopted to solve the mystery. Villenueve touches here on a very important point: what would be the outcome of an alien communication for humanity? Will it unite us or divide us even more?

Long story short and since we don’t want to spoiler more than necessary, Louise finally understand that language is the real message. The alien are here to teach us their language. They tell Louise that the help of humanity will be needed in a distant future but in order for humanity to be able to communicate with them and properly respond to the problem they must understand and integrate another language, and, consequently, another Thought Process.

Because language is finally not different than thought itself. The 2 are just manifestations of the same thing.

While Thought is the fabric of our inner world, Language is the fabric of our physical world.

Moreover, it is not a coincidence that the answer to the human problem is provided by the “marriage”, first professional and later on, factual, between linguistic and physics. This reminds me of the beautiful conversations at Brockwood Park about language and time between Jiddu Krishnamurti, a mystic, and David Bohm, one of the greatest contributor to the quantum theory.

According to Krishnamurti, Language is Thought. and Thought creates Time, or better said it IS time.

Time, in the sense of linear-time as we know it, only exists if Thought exists.

Louise will learn to feel and experience non-linear time: past, present and future are one, coexisting at the same… time. There is no real separation between them, not “a” before, “a” now and “a” after.

So, the film is not about flying saucers, grey aliens, secret bases under the ocean and nevertheless, it gives a nod to anything related to the UAP topic. Let’s see why:

1- The spaceships are oval-shaped, dark and elongated like many of the reported cigar-shaped objects (ghost rockets, eggs-like crafts, tic-tacs). Moreover, they don’t show any means of propulsion, exhaust, or any aerodynamic parts like wings for example. They looks more similar to big rocks than the Millenium Falcon or the Star Trek Enterprise. They may very well be like Oumuamua would look like it it were finally proven to be an alien artifact. The material doesn’t look like anything we possess on earth. On the contrary it reflects what many witnesses reported: organic, raw and opaque in appearance, like a crafted rock possibly made of some unknown meta-material. In this regard, it seems that Villeneuve did his homerwork studying the Phenomenon. 

2. Once inside we don’t see any control surface, steering wheel, joystick of some sort, computers, not even windows! Nothing that reminds us of a device used to fly or to move aerodynamically. The space inside is aseptic and looks like a masterpiece of geometrical architecture. Moreover, sizes and orientation are not so clear inside. The craft is enormous but the inside could be even bigger than what we perceive from outside since we can see nothing but the extremities of the beings, if they are, indeed, extremities.

3. The ships hovers with their belly on a side exactly like Bob Lazar and many other witnesses, like the students of Westall, Australia, reported.

So what are we looking at? An advanced technology or, maybe another type of technology, if that’s even the case? Is it really technology?

This clearly hints at all hypothesis on Consciousness and UAPs. Are we seeing crafts that are able to distort time and space through the means of a a new physics- as we know it - that manipulates gravity, or are we witnessing an “alien” kind of technology, which is both organic, biological maybe and technological at the same time, assuming the three realities were even separated in an hypothetical alien, non-human world.

Language is, eventually, fragmentation. A tree is not a sum of its many infinitesimal parts. Parts only exist after dissecting the tree. The very act of dissection is what creates the parts, manufacturing a new reality. Putting the parts  together won’t bring the tree back as it was. Couldn’t we say the same for the creation of life itself? Maybe the very reason why we, as opposed to Prometheus, could never create life from scratch? Marry Shelley’s modern Prometheus, Dr. Frankenstein puts together parts of dead bodies and manages to give them life but in a very unfortunate way like we may aspire to do by reassembling a dissected tree.

Is not language doing the same thing?

The very moment we name something we fragment its true nature, we create an alter-ego which only exists in our minds since we create a totally new reality which separates what’s been named from the name itself and, therefore, its authentic nature. Like the dissection of the tree, Language and Thought create parts that didn’t previously exist and from that point on, those parts have their own life, separate from the rest, not faithfully representing anymore what they were but, instead, what they have become, like Frankenstein’s creature.

This dissection is what we need to do on our everyday life in order to function. We couldn’t probably survive without it. But the price to pay is the creation of a world what travels in parallel with another world we are not able to see and perceive anymore.

Is this very act of dissection what created gravity, time and what we perceive as our physical world, with its physical laws as we know them?

Is there another possible world, which is not in a far-away galaxy but lies here so close but impenetrable for us, its artificial parts? Only What and Who is the Whole can penetrate the true reality. We may never be able to do so, unless, maybe, as Villenueve seems to suggest, we embrace a totally different Thought and Language. But how could we? Is it not the very existence of Thought what keeps us from understanding and adopt a different one? Can a new liquid enters a bottle which is already full of water unless we manage to empty the bottle first?

And what if the only thing capable of triggering this process of emptiness was something coming from elsewhere, making us realize in a snap of a finger that we are living a sort of illusion or, an incomplete version of the reality.

Can we really succeed in understanding a new possible reality without seeing it first?

Maybe not and that is precisely what being human means and what we would need to awake to un upper state of mind.

Only the clear manifestation of a non-human intelligence could model and regenerate our own.

In Villeneuve’s film Language is, finally, the message and the Agent of Change and (R)Evolution.

We don’t need a specific, written message. That’s just the human way, so open to dangerous misunderstandings (see the aliens not being able to distinguish between “gift” and “weapon” in the film). Human language is doomed like the Who’s on first sketch. It barely serves the purpose of everyday communication.

Likewise, could UAP Researchers stop asking themselves “what is the “alien” message?” “What do they want?” “What are their intentions?” and ponder for a second, if it was just a second, on the possibility that what we perceive as their “technology” could be, simply, the message, the revelation, the apparition. Not different from the apparition of a god for ancient cultures, a non-human entity, a “miracle”, an epiphany, insight or enlightenment induced by meditation or, since we are living the Space Age, a sighting of a spacecraft from a  distant galaxy.

Walter Beltrami