How 'Arrival' Demolishes The Language Barriers

It was Stephen Fry I think who said that “A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie”. The point being is that there is no thought without an expression, no content without form, that an idea however profound it feels to you, does not really exist until you can write it down or, in some cases, put it on film.

To watch Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is to watch a filmmaker in command of the language his ideas presuppose just to say that he has a firm grasp on craft. I can’t really tell you how soothing this is for me as a filmgoer to feel that I’m in the hands of someone who knows why the film is constructed the way it is. So much of today’s filmmaking is all over the place to the point that the viewer has to exert themselves more to compensate the lack of focus. In this way, I think Arrival is the perfect response to the awful movies we see so much of. Pretty much everything they do wrong, Arrival does right. It is effective and impactful, and it does this by focusing on the very thing that affects and impacts us the most: language.

Language is a major theme in the film; the limits of human communication are reinforced and expanded upon in probe throughout the whole film. The limits of our biology of relying on what our senses report, the limits imposed on us by our culture, or our own personalities. In conversation with the aliens, communication is literally imagined as a screen, a mediator that blurs intention. Now screens can connect us, but they can also divide us, and it’s the same with communication. Communication is a link between two parties, but it’s a link that often facilitates a split.

There are two things that the writers implanted in the film, “the future can influence the past” and “communication is limited by perspective”. What’s important here is not that both these readings are valid, they are, but that both have echoes elsewhere in the film and echo off each other. A theme once introduced isn’t wasted. For example, the alien language is circular so the film is too. Also, the difficulty in the cooperation in the small group at the distant Montana site echoes the difficulty of cooperation between nations. Louise’s (Amy Adams) understanding of her displacement in time happens simultaneously with the audience’s realization that the events depicted aren’t linear.

Every theme is filtered through other moments and characters, and eventually, other themes, until it starts to feel like something solid. You start to think “what is the relationship between language and time?” maybe it is that the mind is not a thing but a process, language happening in time just like film is communication occurring in time.

So much of Arrival seems about the possibility of meaning in film. What is it? Where does it come from? I think Villeneuve imagines it as an alien spacecraft; mysterious, obscure, an expression that’s not quite written or spoken language and so always difficult to decipher. Something when bored out of craft and character and story is always hovering over the film, it’s always in the background, seen from different angles impossible to avoid. Arrival isn’t just a repudiation of awful movies because it leads by example, it’s also I think an act of exploration into what makes a movie great. It explores the kind of unique perspective that a film can gift to the filmgoer like a language gifted by aliens and what kind of brand new world that perspective allows us to see.

As a person who majors in languages, part of me watching this film felt that this is one of the films that could break barriers in terms of what language and communication mean to us. Cinema is the highest form of art to me and to express an idea of how language shapes the way we think both figuratively (in our daily conversations) and literally (in the way they contacted the aliens in the film) is groundbreaking. I loved everything about this film from the astounding visuals to the pacifying music. I got to watch it in cinemas and just watched it last week at home, and I won't seem to get enough of Arrival anytime soon.