A couple things to note right off the bat. Firstly, if you're an SF fan, you need to go see this. It's one of those incredibly rare science fiction films that doesn't just look science-fictional, it's actually powered by ideas. That's a very small family—Garland's Ex Machina last year springs to mind.
Secondly, if you haven't read Chiang's story, that is also a thing you should really do. Chiang is among the absolute best short SF writers, full stop, and Story of Your Life is one of those works that is already a touchstone for the field, tackling two heavy ideas—the relationship of language & cognition, and determinism & the nature of time—in a story that is still intensely human, and stylishly-written to boot.
Taylor Clark had a great piece on Chiang leading up to this film in the California Sunday Magazine, by the way. Recommended.
My thoughts below are pretty critical of the film, but please remember that I really enjoyed this film, I want to see more like it. It's an interesting case-study, though, in how adapting really science-fictional (i.e., cerebral) ideas from print to film is problematic, and it also showcases a few tendencies in current block-buster-y film that bug me, perhaps the more so because of all the things this does right.
Spoilers likely for both film & story below. Also, I should note that I saw this with other Think Galactic members, and a lot of thoughts below came out of our discussion.
Three lines of critique here: 1.) some relatively minor quibbles with how the film looks. 2.) The overall feeling of the film. 3.) How the film handles, and sort of mildly flubs, the ideational core of the story.
How it Looks
This is a small quibble, and a purely personal one, but I was kind of bummed out by the overall visual impact of the film. This is particularly strange because I think the actual filmography of Arrival is really quite good, verging on brilliant—which we should expect, coming from Villeneuve & his cinematographer Bradford Young. How it's shot is great, and includes some really dramatic, iconic scenes that call to mind films like 2001.Bluerest Whitaker? I'm trying. |
More like Jeremy GREYnner, eh? Eh? |
Oh, also, if you were hoping this was gonna be the film that broke free of the "all films are Orange & Teal" curse, don't hold your breath. |
How it Feels
Arrival's sound is a departure from Jóhannsson's usual up-beat, tropical melodies celebrating Iceland's colorful bossa nova & tango heritage. |
Incidentally, the wonderful podcast Song Exploder, which looks at how songs are composed and mixed, did an interview with Jóhann Jóhannsson about the creation of "Heptapod B".
Even more incidentally, Jóhannsson's use of arrhythmic vocals reminded me of "The Rockist" by School of Language, bonus connection points for linguist names am I right?
Where was I?
Oh yes: creepy, panicky, exhausted vibes. Now, I think these were largely intentional choices, and I'm not saying they don't work for the film considered on its own. But, more than any plot changes, it's this tonal switch from Chiang's story that saddened me.
In Story of Your Life, the heart of the story is the intellectual excitement of learning about Sapir-Whorf and some mind-expanding facts about time & causality, and a meditation on how an "atemporal" view of human life effects the main character, and particularly how she views her daughter. Chiang makes it a "cerebral safe space", if you will: the ideas are introduced gently, but are terribly exciting once the reader starts wrapping their head around them, and the aliens are both weird enough to startle and funny enough to avoid horror. Furthermore, the excitement and competence of two very different scientists—a linguist and a physicist—are allowed to shine.
In Arrival, the heart of the story is about avoiding nuclear war or some such, in a very short time-frame, with people from the army yelling at you the whole time, while talking to giant booming terrifying elephant squid. The language stuff is there, the time-stuff is there, even the daughter is there, but the interesting ideas are overwhelmed by the sense of danger.
The more I think about it, the most damning thing about Arrival is that it portrays a linguist meeting and talking to aliens joylessly, which is just bizarro. There are tiny flashes of the scientific camaraderie and excitement that fill Story of Your Life, but they are almost completely washed away in the sleep-deprived, impending-disaster-driven film.
It's interesting to compare Arrival to Ex Machina; they both have similar tones and moods, and fairly similar cinematography—but while the color, score, and tone of Ex Machina matched its thematic concerns (fairly creepy uncanny valley questions, and a deeper and creepier theme of female objectification and the male gaze), Arrival's mood indicators are appropriate only to the plot it added to Chiang's ideas, not the ideas themselves. And, unlike Garland, Villeneuve seems content to keep his film very monotone—while there are occasional moments of tension spiking up for a second, it's all in the same vein.
Ex Machina knows how to change it up for a second. |
However, "Abbot is death process" was a pretty bad-ass line, it must be said.
How it Handles Big Ideas
So: Arrival bails pretty hard on the cerebral excitement that characterizes Story of Your Life. However, it still utilizes the core ideas: "language rewires your brain" plus "alien language that doesn't rely on linear time perception" equals "learn to speak it, see the future". Which is cool! And while those ideas are kind of allowed to blossom in the short story more than in the film—the reader is encouraged to learn the concepts, rather than just being presented with them—Arrival still makes them major plot points, so, kudos.Arrival changes the mechanics, however, in ways worth exploring. Biggest and saddest is what happens to language—rather than actually focusing on and walking us through the process of learning the Heptapod languages, we're just kind of told the major steps. In the book, "Heptapod A has essentially no relation to Heptapod B, including word order" is a cool, exciting plot-point. In the film, it's tossed off in a list of "things we've learned". Likewise, the idea of linguistic relativism is tossed off in a single sentence, rather than explored and gradually made concrete.
The linguistic changes, however, are nothing compared to the changes to the theory of time. Story of Your Life goes out of its way to avoid paradox: it introduces the reader to the idea of non-temporal perception gradually, using actual examples from physics. When, by the end of the story, we realize the ability that Banks has gained, we also understand why she's unable to change the future. The story becomes a meditation on ephemerality, on mortality, and how eventual deaths and endings don't deprive any given moment of meaning.
George Roy Hill's 1972 film is a remarkably faithful adaptation of a difficult & cerebral book, perhaps especially given its budget & SFX limitations. |
Arrival, by contrast, has a very different take on how Heptapod B affects humans: it just gives Banks the ability to "see the future" in a conventional, not-very-deep way. When she averts the world-war-or-whatever, she does so simply by telling a Chinese general something he told her in the future, thus creating a paradox. If you extrapolate from the way the film works, you have to start thinking about multiple timelines or, at the very least, a kind of arms-race of precognition, since a future-seeing-and-therefore-changing ability is now available to anyone willing to learn the language. Yikes. Totally different than the mechanics of Chiang's story; rather than a consistent-but-mind-altering thought about time, we're given a cool-but-magical-and-inconsistent technology.
I have to give Villeneuve & co. credit for changing the way Banks' daughter dies—in the story, she dies from a climbing accident; in the film, from a rare untreatable disease. If Banks has the kind of disaster-aversion precognition she just demonstrated in the film, then telling her daughter not to go on the mountain that particular day would suffice, but it still makes sense that she might choose to have a daughter who'd die young from disease. (This gets into a very murky ethical area about what we owe potential humans, quality of life, oy.) But that's a very different world than the one of Chiang's story, with a completely different philosophical spin.
In Conclusion
Okay, griping done. This was a good film. It's still very idea focused, and although the tone, to me, seems a mismatch with the ideas, it didn't devolve into an action movie. Even the one (unnecessary, IMHO) action-addition towards the end didn't derail it for me. It wasn't another franchise movie! It wasn't about blowing stuff up! And it's commercially (as well as critically) successful! All good things, and makes me hopeful for more good really science-fictional films.TNG, season 5, episode 2. You should probably watch that. |
Also, if you're reading this and wanting some more language-based SF, might I suggest:
- Delany's Babel-17
- Stephenson's Snow Crash
- Elgin's Native Tongue
- Much of Cherryh's work: particularly the "Foreigner" series, and also Hunter of Worlds & 40,000 in Gehenna
- Miéville's Embassytown
- Barry's Lexicon
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