Arrival: Would you choose your future, if you knew it?
Similarly to its source material, Ted Chiang’s short novel Story of Your Life, the film unfolds in several
timelines. The film begins with a glimpse to the future timeline of Louise Banks (Amy Adams) that is
threaded throughout the whole film by means of short interludes, the full meaning of which we’ll be allowed
to grasp only by arriving to the end. The life of Louise, our thoughtful heroine and a world-class linguist,
and her university routine university of a teacher is interrupted by the arrival of extraterrestrials on Earth.
Louise is recruited by the army to decipher their language and help to establish communication.
The heptapods, a name later designated to them by Ian, Louise’s physicist colleague, on account of them
having seven symmetrical tentacles, aren’t presented to us before the 32nd minute. Villeneuve delays their
reveal presenting us only with media news broadcasts and the general widespread panic, cleverly eliciting
in us an unease, but also excitement of the reveal.
Thus with our attention focused, the heptapods are revealed, separated from us by a glass wall. In this first
encounter, we recognize in Louise and her team of scientists fear of the reaction of the unknown, as well as
the excitement from the new. Louise and Ian then embark on a difficult task: understanding the language
of aliens and thus creating communication between two different species.
The otherness, or otherworldliness of heptapods is beautifully captured in the film’s score, created by
Johnan Johnannsson. Louise is being transported to the a makeshift military base, building up suspense
with a low unwavering drone, suddenly interrupted by deep, random sound of trumpet when we sight
heptapod’s ship
The score of the film by Johann Johannsson wonderfully manages to express this otherness or
otherworldliness. The music expresses the sense of the dread of scientists as they are about to encounter the
aliens, the fear of what their arrival would mean for us as well as its significance by epic loud
Táto inakosť je výborne podtrhnutá by the score by Johann Johannsson, an Icelandic composer, who
managed to express both the otherworldly and intimate. Jednak sa score snaží zachytiť náš starch,
nebezpečenstvo, temnotu, neznámosť, jednak zachytáva krásu snahy po porozumení medzi dvoma
rozdielnymi druhmi, učenie sa, cognitive process – voices.
Ako Ian a Louise make progress, one of the general themes of the movie emerges: the difference in thinking
and understanding of linearity which is actually even visually respresented by their language. Heptapods
don’t perceive world from the perspective of linearity, their signs and sentences don’t have the beginning
or end.
As the main timeline catches up with the secondary, we learn another aspect that doesn’t have beginning
or and to heptapods: time. Louise is the only one from the science team who is able to grasp the concept,
and actually experience it, as we learn that the glimpses from the other timeline are her future. With the
calmness characteristic to her for the whole movie, Louise accepts and directs her life towards this future,
playing with the idea of free will and linking her present with her future by the fact that she would choose
her future irrespective of the fact whether she knew it.
As its model, Arrival preserves its main idea and breaks the expected and played out pattern of the portrayal
of the arrival of extraterrestrials, which is usually presented as portrayal of highly intelligent, but also
insidious creatures whose main purpose is to use our weaknesses against us and destroy the humanity.
Instead, Arrival pred nás kladie otázku of the existential significane of the other beings in universe, kladie
nám otázku, čo všetko sa môžeme naučiť od tejto otherness, ktorej nerozumieme, krásne prepojenú na
human story (otherwise we wouldn’t understand it).