Sunday!
Having seen Arrival, I can enthusiastically recommend it to everyone out there. There you go. Close this tab and get your ticket now. Know that, if you keep reading, you’re going to see spoilers and those spoilers might have an impact upon how much you enjoy the movie in the moment.
Okay, are you still here? I assume that you’ve either seen it or won’t mind being spoiled somewhat.
The movie is one of those that has a somewhat big reveal in the last quarter or so. Now, lest I summon memories of The Sixth Sense, I’ll say that the big reveal is more of a moment of clarity rather than a twist. The movie spends a great many moments telling you a number of things without giving you the context for the things it has told you… and then, at the moment of clarity, you’re given the context. This is a rather lovely moment and more takes the form “ooooh… I’ve heard that word a hundred times but I never understood what it meant until now” rather than “ALL OF YOUR ASSUMPTIONS UP TO THIS POINT WERE WRONG”.
It’s a science fiction movie with an emphasis on the “science” and it’s the sciency part of science rather than the engineering part of it. Do you like linguistics and language theory? Well, you’re going to love this particular movie.
Now we get into the weeds. I am 100% down with the whole “different languages cause you to wire your brain differently” thing. I like that. It absolutely makes sense to me that knowing one language would cause you to think in one way and knowing another language would cause you to think differently, even if you spent your life dealing with the same phenomena. Language is like a tool that will help you deal and interact with these phenomena. Some languages are like a saw or a wedge, some languages are like a leatherman. I’m 100% down with that.
Where the movie gets me, and I’m putting the details of this complaint behind spoiler tags, was where we got into one of the time travel problems out there.
Specifically, the “Information Loop”.
The scene where we see her getting/transmitting information across eras? Where the Chinese General gives her his phone number in the future so she can call him in the past, where she relays his message to her that she gave to him?
That bugged the heck out of me.
I was running with the movie with the language thing. I was running with the movie with the aliens thing. I was running with the movie with the language can cause you to see things differently to the point where even time is seen differently… but I couldn’t past the whole “bootstraps” thing.
That problem was a very, very small problem, though.
A strong story, with a very strong female protagonist, interesting discussions of language theory, fun special effects that don’t particularly feel “special”, and plenty of fodder to argue about on the car drive home? That right there is money well spent.
If you haven’t seen it, you ought to.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
Arrival is awesome. As is the story it’s (pretty faithfully) based on. Ted Chiang is a great, great, SF author, but he doesn’t write novels and puts out about one short story a year, so almost everything he’s ever written is in this one collection: Stories of Your Life. Buy it. You won’t be sorry.Report
It’s been my favorite movie this year The same director’s (Dennis Villenueve) Sicario was my favorite movie from last year. And he is the guy that will be directing Blade Runner II next year. So in the moments that I can put Mr. Trump out of my mind, I’m looking forward to the future.
I had no problem with the “extended vision across time” trope–science fiction is primarily a vehicle for social metaphor–but was bothered by the alien’s stupid alphabet. Every sentence and every word looks like the stain left by a glass of iced tea on a wood table.Report
The carnage of 2016 continues. RIP, Detective Harris.Report
Well, we already knew there wasn’t going to be a revival of Firefly. Still, it sucks. This has truly been annus horribils.Report
If you haven’t already, you should read the short story. I really liked the movie, but the short story delves much more in the linguistic and science issues and ties them together in a very neat way.
And the short story avoids the issue that bothered you (and me). Short story spoiler: The international crisis and its “All you zombies” resolution doesn’t appear in the book. Instead, it is discovered that the heptapods’ written language enables/relies on experiencing all of time simultaneously. But the the process is such that anyone getting that simultaneous view has no desire to change the perceived future but rather naturally wishes to follow it. (If I follow the argument right, your time line basically follows all possible paths till it finds a stable solution where you won’t want to change) Report
See, that is an elegant solution.
If a hair optimistic.Report
I think that there are at least two subplots in the film that sell this exact idea. One of them has been front and center the whole time.
The first is her daughter. She knows that the child will be born with some sort of genetic unstoppable disease, such as cystic fibrosis. She knows this will drive away her husband and lover. She goes ahead and does it anyway, with no regrets.
The second is Costello’s death. They know, presumably, that they will be killed by the bomb. (And Abbot knows, too, or did I get them switched?) But they choose to be there and transmit the vital information to Louise and Ian, because they know what the stakes are and what the consequences are.
I think that this can work with General Shang. He does what he does because he prefers this outcome. He didn’t know he would, but once he does know, he likes it, and so he cooperates with his own, very limited understanding. (I think that Louise tells him what happens in the future as part of the phone call.)
The point is not so much the paradox as it is that this is a version of reality that is stable. That knowing the future doesn’t always make you want to change it. Sometimes you do the thing you have always known you will do. And other times you suddenly realize that what you were doing isn’t what you wanted.Report
I haven’t seen the movie, nor read the spoilers (this looks interesting enough to get me to a theater) but your description makes me think of The Sparrow. Which, if you haven’t read, pick it up. Fantastic SF novel, one of the best of the “90’s.
The movers come tomorrow, the wife has left with the plants (5×8 u-haul full) and pets (four) the house is a warren of boxes and furniture. And I will be sanse internet/my books for a few days, so I wandered down to the local paperback exchange and picked up The Gripping Hand (never read, but loved Mote) and Chance (good solid but easy Conrad) to bid the time.Report
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but The Gripping Hand is possibly the most disappointing sequel ever, and that includes the reign of Louis the Pious.Report
I’d have to mention two movie sequels Of Which We Do Not Speak to do worse than The Gripping Hand.Report
The sequel to The Sparrow is also hugely disappointing, and seemed to erase everything I loved about the original to give it a happy ending.Report
I preferred Children of God to Sparrow.
I’m about a hundred pages into Too Like the Lightning now.Report
For a single sequel, I’ll give this to you. For an ongoing disaster, what about all of the Dune sequels/prequels/whatnot that are still coming out? Sheer volume has to count for something.Report
Apropos, Pournelle’s kid wrote yet a third Motie book. Never even thought about reading it.Report
I made good progress on my 2016 movie list over the last week of vacation. I caught X-Men: Apocalypse (A-), Independence Day: Resurgence (B) and Star Trek Beyond (C-) all on Amazon streaming. We also saw Doctor Strange (A) and Arrival (A-) in the theater.
Regarding Arrival…I’m still not clear how learning the language enabled her to see the future, but overall, it was pretty good and beautifully filmed. I expect an Oscar nomination for Adams and maybe a Best Supporting for Renner.
We tried to catch Fantastic Beasts last night but it was sold out. Hopefully we’ll see it sometime this week. Really starting to get excited for Rogue One.Report
It’s that language can make you see things differently.
If you want to get vaguely political, you can read 1984 or Anthem and it might be easier to see from that angle.
Looking for another, less political angle, I’m struggling for a good example… colors, maybe? If a society has only one word for “blue” and “green” or for “red” but not for “orange”, does that change anything?
Is there a language theorist in the house?Report
Mike D,
Regarding your blocked comment:
They present what I took to be the main idea pretty quickly in the movie: that our concept of language is linear (one word after the other) and therefore communication only takes place, linearly, in time, whereas the heptapod written language, being circular, communicates thoughts atemporally and all at once. Report
@jaybird @stillwater
I get that their language is non-linear, but in order to see the future…ummm, how do I enable that ability simply by getting you to think about time as non-linear? I just don’t see how changing one’s concept of time makes them clairvoyant.Report
That’s why they broght up the Sapir Whorf hypothesis: A theory that language wires our brains in ways that determine how we, as speakers, perceive reality. So, it’s not so much that learning Heptapod language allows people to violate our laws of physics as much as that our language constrains us to viewing the world as determined by those laws.
At least, that’s how it struck me.Report
Well, I don’t know if this would help, but pre-langage man probably had no ability to conceive of technology, to create and spend money, or to form complex negotiations. I read recently (I think in one of the many thought-pieces on Arrival, that other than the primary colors, black and white, that man cannot perceive colors for which there is no name: maroon gets lumped to “red,” and chartreuse to green. For any thinking that requires “symbolic manipulation” requires language.
(BTW: how is it that everybody here except me knows how to mask their text?)
When I was in my 20s and 30s, I used to travel to a different country once or twice a year. Not only did I find that the different cultural foundations are reflected in language, but I became convinced over time that they were also mediated by language, as well..
If you read about quantum theory, there is a dominant strain of thought that the idea of linear time is more or less a construct of consciousness. Whether that is driven more by biological processes, or by language, physicists don’t have that same perspective that time runs in one direction, and is monotonic. So just as the idea of radio communication was fantastical before Marconi, the idea of non-linear time perception seems impossible, until the moment it actually happens.
That seems like an absolutely fantastic premise for a science fiction meditation on thought, communication, and perception.Report
To mask your text, highlight it after you’ve written it, then press the “spoiler” button right about the comment field.
Or you can put, in those little bracket thingies above the comma and period:
at the beginning and end of the section you want to black out.Report
@snarky-mcsnarksnark
So…if I know that time can be non-linear…why can’t I see the future?Report
Because you don’t have the intellectual constructs to perceive it (just like a Hawaiian would not be able to discern different types of snow). What the aliens offered was the language / concepts that would make that kind of perception accessible.Report
So…if I know that time can be non-linear…why can’t I see the future?
Who knows? But from what I gathered it’s sorta like this: the sentence you wrote up there only exists in time (one word after another…) and that type of thinking (not conceptualizing, mind, but that too…) restricts us. It’s only when the lead actress begins to understand the language that her brain, concomitant with learning the grammar, semantics, etc, begins to rewire allowing her to think differently. And at that point she begins to access “memories” of the her future daughter’s life and the words the Chinese guy said on his wife’s deathbed. What you lack, Mike, is the rewiring which results from learning heptapod. 🙂Report
I dunno. I speak fluent Heptapod, and I thought Hillary was going to win.Report
No politics.Report
Seriously? You thought that was political?Report
It’s like the hedge around the Torah.
No religion.Report
It’s a slippery slope argument.
No politics.Report
I think you’re asking whether the premise makes any sense scientifically.
I don’t think it makes a lot of sense, but I can’t rule it out. Physicists are always going on about the “arrow of time” and how it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and how memory is kind of mysterious. I just read an article on the idea that what quantum mechanics is really about is memory. Physicists have also been known to ramble about “closed time-like loops”.
So I wouldn’t call it completely disprovable.Report
It doesn’t dispense with the time-travel paradoxes, e.g. there’s nothing to stop a person from doing something that would change an incident she “remembers”.Report
I agree it was a terrific movie. Tight, intelligent story; great acting; fabulous pace and consistent intensity; beautiful cinematography; wonderful music; free of pandering and hackneyed Hollywood tropes.
That said, I also had a problem with the time travel thing. From a dramatic perspective I thought they did a phenomenal job of presenting it to us by having both us and her learn about it at the same time. From a logical pov, tho, I’m not sure I understand it except that all her “memories” of her daughter also hadn’t happened, yet she had them. Memories of futures past. Which helped prime that well without resolving to causal-loop problem you mention. Also, I loved the idea that the coherence of interstellar space travel isn’t bound by our contemporary understanding of natural laws but rather arriving at a point where we can transcend them. I thought that was a clever twist. Report
I loved the daughter stuff. That tied everything together for me.
I thought that the various… things… we saw in the opening had already happened by the time the movie got rolling and that’s why she was in the house by herself but when it came out that they merely hadn’t happened yet? I was blown away. That was *SO* good.
(Without delving into religion, was that the most pro-life movie to come out in a long, long time? Like since Innerspace or something?)Report
The flashback/flashforward thing really got me. I fell for the trope completely, tho my wife sniffed out something weird by noticing that the mother was the exact same age in every flash. And I didn’t really think about it as a pro-life movie (being more focused on the space langauge stuff) but since you mentioned it, yeah, I agree.Report
I thought that the filmmaking was very clever in the way it used “flashbacks”. It relied upon our assumptions about how flashbacks work, and what they mean, and then gave us a different interpretation. There was some care taken with her “dreams” to not say things that would break the illusion. For a while, I thought that the heptapods were empathically triggering memories that would be helpful to the task. Not exactly.
I did not read it as pro-life. Louise clearly made a choice, a choice that having the child was worth it. She chose to get pregnant, in fact, knowing what would happen. If the power of the state is marshalled to command women to bear fetuses to term, there is no choice involved, and the beauty of that choice, and the respect for the woman making it, is destroyed.Report
Well, I suppose that that is why we try to avoid politics/religion.Report
Or, skirting the edges of politics/not-politics divide: the movie wasn’t Pro-Choice, it was pro-lived-experience even when knowing those events will cause lots of personal suffering.Report
I endorse this view. Sometimes people choose to allow suffering in their lives, and it’s a good thing.Report
Revisited Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud. Alien intelligence with a minimum of anthropomorphism.Report
Footfall. If I remember right, the aliens had an 8 fingered? trunk? which put their mathematics at base 8.Report
I read Footfall when it first came out, so little memory of it left, other than the Orion at the end. (Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! …)Report
This whole thread looks like an NSA public access request.Report
I saw this. I liked it. On a cinematic note, I quite enjoyed an early long take where Louise walks out of a building into a parking lot. Two jets fly past in view, the camera tracks them, then we see a parking-lot collision. We swing back to Louise and as she goes to get in her car, two more jets emerge from behind a taller parking structure in the background, with a startling roar. I loved that shot, it told us so much.
About 3/4ths of the way through I thought to myself, “Billy Pilgrim had become unstuck in time”. Did anyone else have this experience?
I thought this had a lot in common with Gravity as well. Because of the mixing of science fiction story and personal tragedy, not to mention the female protagonist, and the emotional importance of the death of a child.Report