Okay, it's been out for almost a month now, but I really wanted to get down some thoughts on Arrival, the recent film by Denis Villeneuve. An adaptation of Ted Chiang's 1998 Story of Your Life, the film follows a linguist and her team as they try to communicate with some decidedly non-human aliens.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.
