Arrival

“Maybe I'd say what I feel more often.” Y'all ever watch a movie and sit down until it hits you and tears start rolling down, not because of sadness but because of what peak in the form of art you've just witnessed? Arrival is hands down the best work of Denis Villeneuve in my eyes due to it's intimate writing paired with it's structure. It felt like I'm watching not one, but two of my favourites in Sci-Fi Genre, Interstellar and 2001 A Space Odyssey being perfected or atleast succeeded in a masterful way, taking what both of those movies provide into one culminated product. I don't usually write a lot on here but I will for Arrival because why not? Denis Villeneuve is a man of some godly talent, his craft of being able to give body to all these things is magnificent, and I won't even speak about the camerawork and visuals of the film and it's brilliant soundtrack. **Ignore any typos. ** A friend told me “You remember watching the film, even when you're watching it for the first time.” while recommending this movie to me. The whole movie itself is a palindrome in effect, which reinforces the overarching narrative of the plot. “We are so bound by time.” The title card of the film doesn't show up at the beginning, but the end, the thesis being the Arrival isn't that of the aliens from outer space, but rather the audience's arrival at what they watched, OUR arrival at comprehension of the non linear way memories work, something which only Louise has been able to get along with throughout the movie, serving as kinda our anchor through it. You spend the first 2 acts being teased with Louise's memories of Hannah which turn out to be events in the future, and that it would end in misery with Hannah's death. You couldn't see the pieces until you see the whole and the complete shape only becomes visible once every part had passed through you, thus we couldn't understand what each memory of Louise are, or even what Louise is, until we have seen the whole picture. Same goes for Louise, she arrives at the conclusion to live her life anyways, embracing each and every moment regardless of what the future holds, which she already knows. Denis Villeneuve used some of the best symbolism I've seen in cinema to capture this process, the first act, Louise is walking down a linear path while the movie ends with Louise now going through a circular path after getting the news of her daughter's disease. A circle has no beginning or end, it's a loop, thus the alien's language in circular loops which grants Louise the ability to see the future. **“Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it. And I welcome every moment of it.” ** Heptapods provide Louise a new language, a language which doesn't have a first or last stroke, the whole circular script arriving at once, just like how the creatures writing them are living their lives all at once. On the other hand, humans follow a linear language, a strict orderly mannered grammar, just like how our lives are. Restricted to the order of time. The limits of your language are the limits of your world. Learn a language with no tense, and you lose the thing tense was hiding, the illusion that the future hasn't happened to you yet. Wittgenstein's philosophy hangs over the whole film implicitly, Louise doesn't simply get told the future but rather learns to cultivate her memories in a shape that has no sense of order in it. Now here comes the Kubrick magic, Villeneuve used upright, anti-aerodynamic black spaceships which stand, and are somehow balanced. I believe this to, not only be a direct nod to the monoliths from Space Odyssey but also a spiritual successor of my interpretation of them. A black obelisk that doesn't invade so much as wait to be understood, rewarding understanding with evolution rather than conquest. The 2001 monolith taught apes to use a bone as a weapon and later taught Bowman to die into something outside time altogether, to evolve into ubermensch. The 12 ships in Arrival scattered over the earth like the numbers on a clock face, forcing 12 separate nations to share the 12 pieces of one message does the same thing to Louise. The spaceship serves as a door to help one evolve. And the screen inside it, the glass she presses her palm to, and the window of her house, several shots which have the same parallel, they all share its shape with the cinema screen we're watching all of this through, us, in a dark room, facing a rectangle, trying to read meaning out of something that refuses to unfold in the order we're used to. This whole thing once again connects to my point at the beginning of this review. Obviously the monoliths in 2001 being identical to cinema screens isn't very explicit other than the ratios of their dimensions. However, Arrival completely accepts the language of aliens which elevate us to a non linear scale as an "art". **“Language was seen as an expression of art.” ** The aliens literally write their script on what looks very similar to a theatre screen. Rather than leaving the door open for us, like Kubrick did half a century ago, Villeneuve instead chooses to let the protagonist walk through the monoliths throughout the course of his movie. Because that's where it stops being science fiction and turns into something closer to Mike Flanagan territory even though it beat him to it in every way obviously. Flanagan's whole career runs on the idea that horror and love aren't opposites, theyre the same event looked at from two different distances. Arrival does this with time itself. The horror here was never the aliens but the foreknowledge of a mother knowing her daughter's demise. But despite that, being able to live through every moment that you already have visited in your memories, to love the person you know you'll bury one day, shows the meaning in life itself, each part of your life means as much as the whole, you just need to finish the whole thing to see the parts. Villeneuve trusted the audience with this one, love this specific and this doomed is still worth doing, that the point was never the ending, it was every single ordinary moment leading up to it and for that you need to go through every moment, regardless of what it is. And that's exactly why I went straight back to the start the second it ended. A palindrome, remember? So, the final say of Arrival is obviously the answer to Louise's question, “If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”