“But Then Again, Who Does?”: Unraveling the Story of Arrival

This week, I finally got around to seeing the 2016 movie Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve and based off of the Ted Chiang novella “Story of Your Life.” I’m a huge fan of Chiang, who I think is one of the science fiction masters writing right now, and I was really impressed by Villeneuve’s Dune adaptations, which is why I was willing to give it a shot. “Story of Your Life” is, to be clear, an amazing work of art, but it’s also a short, meditative piece on the nature of grief and the concept of time, that mostly consists of people in meetings talking about linguistics. I was skeptical that it could be transformed into a feature-length movie without losing everything of value. But, as is so often the case, I was wrong. Arrival is a transcendentally beautiful film, and I think Villeneuve may actually be a bona fide genius when it comes to adaptations. I am going to SPOIL EVERYTHING in regards to both story and movie, so fair warning if you want to go in without forewarning.

1. “Story of Your Life” and Arrival are built around the same premise: alien spacecraft have landed on Earth, and our protagonist, linguist Louise Banks, has been recruited by the U.S. military to try and decode their language, working together with physicist Ian Donnelly. Throughout this, we cut repeatedly to flashbacks about her failed marriage, and the death of her daughter, with her insights from those experiences helping to inform her progress in translating the speech of these so-called “Heptapods”. For Banks and her colleagues, this is a strange, amazing, almost inexplicable task, that literally reshapes how they see the world. But for her terrified superiors, and their counterparts around the world, the only thing that really matters is finding out why these extraterrestrials are here, and what they want from us. It’s an amazing premise, one that takes an aspect of “First Contact” that is so often completely ignored–communication–and building the entire story out of it. In Chiang’s original story, there’s barely even a plot beyond that, though Villeneuve builds out more of a structure around the core conceit.

2. Villeneuve takes a very similar approach to Arrival as he did with Dune, opting for what this essay called a “faithful but not dogmatic” adaptation, opting not to try and do a scene-by-scene transcription, but instead translating the ideas and themes into cinematic language. “Story of Your Life” is, again, not a story that I think was easy to turn into a movie. It’s not cinematic, it’s mostly focused on what Dr. Banks is thinking about. Villeneuve makes a lot of changes, especially in regards to expanding the plot enough that it lasts two hours, but the emotional core of the story is still there. The structure of the film is the same as that of the novella, a series of unfolding mysteries, some of which you don’t realize are mysteries, built around an aching, agonizing grief that you can’t escape, but can only come to terms with. Exposition and dialogue is often replaced with lingering shots and gorgeous visuals, but everything important is still there. It’s really an extraordinary achievement of storytelling.
3. Speaking of which, I really loved the cinematography and editing of Arrival. The focus of the movie is the sudden intrusion of the inexplicable into the mundane, and I love the way Villeneuve illuminates that. The contrast of the ordinary cherry pickers, positioned next to the hovering, physics-defying spacecraft lingers in the mind, as does the scurrying, terrified chaos of the military encampments, sitting in the shadow of these silent, enigmatic monoliths. The film uses silence so well, often eliding whole scenes or discussions, letting the viewer absorb the implications themselves, at their own pace. The introduction of the alien landing, near the start of the film, is particularly well-done, a slowly, subtly unfolding horror story, told through background details and television news shows we never quite manage to see. It’s an oblique approach that compliments the themes of the story, sets a mood of fear and awe, and yet manages to never be confusing or hard-to-follow.
4. At the heart of both story and film is the conceit of a language that simply does not have a concept of linear time. Thus, in a sort of supercharged Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis, the people who learn to speak and think in Heptapod also then lose their concept of linear time. “I don’t believe in beginnings anymore” is one of the first lines of the movie, a subtle, and ominous piece of foreshadowing, as we eventually come to realize that Dr. Banks’ family tragedies did not happen before the movie, but will happen in the future. Ian Donnelly is the man she will marry, their daughter the child who will die untimely young. But to a speaker of Heptapod, will or did are simply category errors, a purposeless distinction with no real meaning. The movie makes the brilliant decision to portray the logograms of the alien language as circles, loops of writing that begin from both ends and work their way towards the middle, as if you could know how you would finish your sentence before you began to speak. Time travel here isn’t a form of technology, but merely a different way of seeing the world, a trick of the mind, an idea explored in more depth in Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again (1970). This is kind of a classic Ted Chiang plot, if you’ve read much of his work. He’s fascinated by these perceptual shifts, the attempt to imagine what a world would look like if you could change the way you saw it, or if some of the underlying postulates of reality moved beneath your feet. This is a hard idea to describe, not to mention depict on screen, which is why in both stories this intellectual concept is conveyed primarily through the emotional arc of Louise’s relationship with her daughter, Hannah.
5. A few hours before watching the movie, my dad and I were talking about Battlestar Galactica (2004), which he’s currently watching. This led into a discussion of Edward James Olmos, which led to Blade Runner (1982), and specifically the last line of the movie, which he delivers: “It’s a shame she won’t live – but then again, who does?” It’s a reference to the replicants, and their genetically-programmed short lives. But it also goes beyond that. None of us live forever. Seven years or seventy, we only have however much time we’re given, and none of us know for sure how long that is. This turned out be an eerily prescient conversation, because that’s also the theme of Arrival. By the end of the movie, Dr. Banks already knows what is going to happen if/when she marries Ian and has a child. She–like us–has seen it all; the joy and love and the agony and heartbreak, all of it. And she chooses to embrace it anyways. Life is to be lived, and savored, and treasured, every drop and every moment, whether we’re fated to die tomorrow or in a century. It’s a profoundly humanist message, an affirmation of the value of human experience above all else. There’s a philosophical idea called eternal recurrence, the claim that time is circular, and everything just repeats, over and over again. Louise Banks grapples with this, and decides that it doesn’t matter. Live your life now, no matter what your fate is. Love your daughter, and mourn her, and keep moving forward as long as you can. After all, who does?
6. I’m really impressed with how Villeneuve structured the film around this “twist”, because I don’t think it could have been easy. “Story of Your Life” does the same thing, letting the reader think that the interludes are flashbacks until the very end, but that’s easier to do in text, I suspect. Film is a very temporal medium, we implicitly assume that events are occurring in the order that we see them, unless we’re told otherwise. You can elide so many details in text, simply by not showing them, a movie is less forgiving of continuity errors. And yet, Arrival pulls it off, balancing the two halves of the movie perfectly, letting the viewer exist in a state of quantum superposition. When the wave-function collapses, and we see the truth of the latter, it makes sense, but the movie never had to cheat, or lie to us about what we were seeing. It let us draw our own conclusions.
7. The plot of the original novella is solely focused on Banks’ personal traumas and her efforts to decipher Heptapod, with the aliens’ intentions and impact on Earth being mostly background noise. The movie fleshes this aspect out considerably, but I think it does so in way that’s very consistent with the existing framework of the story. Paranoia and panic sweeps the planet as questions mount about what these enigmatic aliens really want, and nations begin competing with each other to solve the riddle, desperate for advantages and terrified of a trap or a trick. In the end, neither aliens or humans are really the villains–not even the ferocious Chinese general saber-rattling on TV. The enemy is miscommunication, and fear, and the problems inherent in trying to convey complicated ideas through an imperfect medium. Villeneuve also gives the Heptapods a coherent motive, which the original story notably lacks. In both versions, their true intention is to give humanity their language, and the perception it grants, but in Arrival, we learn that they are trying to help us, so that we can help them in three thousand years. It’s an elegant and simple solution to the kind of dangling thread that’s much more noticeable on screen.
8. I really love that this is, at its heart, a story about translation and linguistics. The movie adds in a few action scenes for drama, but the arc of the plot is focused around simply trying to speak to someone else, and all of the unexpected pitfalls and complications inherent in this. The fact that “tool” and “weapon” are terms that can be used interchangeably in some contexts is a major plot point, and one that almost triggers a global war. The Chinese attempt to communicate with “their” Heptapods through games of mahjong, which ends up influencing the very forms of message which can be transmitted, and how they’re interpreted. So much of the runtime ends up focusing on the simple, basic questions of how to explain what a question is, or how to convey the concept of a personal name. It’s such a brilliant, unique premise, and the movie doesn’t shy away from it.
9. One plot device the movie adds to the original story is that of a closed time loop. Near the end of the film, with the world on the edge of global Armageddon, Dr. Banks is able to avert the crisis by contacting the Chairman of the People’s Liberation Army, and convince him to stand down. She is able to do this, because she knows what to tell him, because he tells her what she told him in the future, after the crisis was resolved. I love this, and I can’t help but notice that it’s very similar to ideas that Ted Chiang has played with in other stories, such as The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. It feels like a very appropriate addition.
10. I found myself really liking how the movie depicts the character of Colonel Weber, who’s a pretty minor player in “Story of Your Life”, as I recall. Weber is the soldier running the whole secret translation/investigation program, and he’s in the unenviable position of having to liaison between brilliant scientists who resent being managed and terrified superiors who don’t understand why they can’t get what they want right now. He could be a stereotypical military idiot, but instead comes off as a guy who’s a lot smarter than he’s letting on, and who really just cares about getting the job done–a character trait I always love to see. All of the acting in the movie is great, but Forrest Whitaker really brings this role to life in a very enjoyable way, despite the paucity of the source material.