New arrivals. Sand sculpture at the 'Sandworld' exhibit in Warnemunde, Germany, 2014.Flickr/Brando.n. Some rights reserved. Arrival, the film adaption of the novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, has been recognised as one of the most intelligent sci-fi films of recent years, as concerned with helping us see our own world anew as with what might exist beyond it. It is especially poignant, perhaps, that Denis Villeneuve’s movie was released only days after a bitter US Presidential race, whose outcome was only the most shocking upset of a year that has exposed seemingly irresolvable political and cultural divisions. For essentially it is a story about the possibility of communication, of bridging the abysmal gulfs that stop us talking to each other.
An alien civilisation visits Earth, their opaque, ovoid spacecraft – monumental structures recalling 2001’s monoliths – materialising one day at various locations across the world: the Indian Ocean, the Siberian tundra, the plains of Montana - twelve in all. Their portals hover a few metres from the ground, inviting entry. The subsequent meetings with the extraterrestrials powerfully convey something of the radical otherness of alien life. Partially visible, swathed in swirling fog behind a transparent screen, the tentacular ‘heptapods’ have no front or back, and communicate by projecting enigmatic circular symbols on the barrier’s surface. This is sci-fi that understands the difference between encountering and communicating with other forms of life, recalling Wittgenstein’s observation that if ‘a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.’
But a breakthrough is made. And as the alien script is gradually decoded it becomes apparent they have come to bring a gift, not war, and that the gift is their language itself, and the new perception of reality it unlocks: the ability to see, as they do, into the future as well as the past, to experience time as a totality, not simply as a linear series of events. That may be an improbable interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language structures our perception of the world. But whatever liberties have been taken with the theory for cinematic purposes, the film’s essential message is delivered with emotional force and clarity: a shared language opens the possibility of conversation, and conversation the possibility of peace. It’s a thought worth holding onto today, when our public discourse is so charged with anger.
