Arrival Review
Harry Topley
We finally got to see Arrival. We were not disappointed.
We've been wanting to see the new Sci-fi flick "Arrival" since we first saw the trailers. The combination of a unique plot and some powerful alien imagery had us appropriately excited, but we still weren't sure where this film would dare to take us. The journey ended up being very cerebral and just a little bit surreal. Our greatest thrills in the film came from the aliens and their ship(s); the design work there was brilliant. The crux of the film which has been teased in the trailer, the hidden win for every xenobiologist and real space exploration geek, is that rather than reach for the easy plot fix and busting out the universal translation device, the main character is charged with translation. How do you start talking with a thing you share nothing in common with?
The film approaches this brilliantly with a beautifully complex alien written language. The movie has a timely message about the underpinnings of communication, and how the languages we speak can influence the way we see the world. The latter is a scientific theory that has been gaining tremendous steam in social sciences. While we would love to have gotten a glimpse of an alien home world, we were just as happy to experience an alien view of ours. While "Arrival" did a spectacular job of taking a harder look at how a first encounter could play out, we did have to take an insulin shot for the emotional aspect of the plot, that was just too sweet, but there has to be something for people who don't get excited for a pure science movie.