This is not a negative blog. But when I saw people who
should know better praising the movie Arrival,
I thought my head would explode.
For this initial part, I’ll say that if you like the star of
the movie, Amy Adams, she gives a magnificent performance. If you want to see
two hours of her on the big screen going through an array of emotions, you will
probably like it.
You just have to ignore the stuff coming out of her mouth or
the mouths of the other actors. I am now going to be very skeptical of science
fiction movies with A-list actors that are aimed at mainstream audiences.
I can sum up this movie with one word: illogical.
The big clue that Arrival
is going to be a thunderously stupid movie comes at the start. Louise Banks
(Amy Adams) is an expert linguist. Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) has to
decide between recruiting her or some fellow in California.
Louise says to ask the other linguist what the Sanskrit word for “war” means.
The colonel goes there and comes back, picking Louise. You see, she knew the
true root meaning of the word.
Huh? How could the colonel, who doesn’t know any more about
linguistics and Sanskrit than Louise does about how to pilot a helicopter or
fire an M16 rifle, make that determination? This is especially a non-starter
because he didn’t know what Louise would say about the root meaning before he
returned.
Just allow me to crush this gnat with a sledge hammer:
Military Guy does not know which intellectual to pick. Redhead Intellectual
says ask California Intellectual a question. Military Guy does and gets an
answer he can’t possibly evaluate. Military Guy picks Redhead Intellectual,
because her answer that he hasn’t heard yet and can’t possibly evaluate must be
better.
I spent some time on this early scene because the whole
movie is like this. It is one illogical scene after another.
They show the transition from natural gravity to artificial
gravity inside the spaceship. Fine. But the military people, who have done this
before, leave an inexperienced civilian to go last. They say something like “Jump”
to that person. And this makes sense how?
They actually take a canary with them, to see if the air
goes bad while they’re trying to talk to the aliens. Really? With all the
scientific equipment they had with them, which were specifically giving off
readings on the air? They bring up the canary-in-a-coal-mine concept to look
smart?
Louise holds a whiteboard to the aliens with the word “Human”
on it. Next time, she holds up one that says “Louise.” Is she just trying to
confuse them? She doesn’t do anything to distinguish between the two words.
Going away from simple logic to the actual discipline of
linguistics, real linguists would be tearing their hair out watching this. After
some time of just staring at the aliens stupidly, Louise gets the radical idea
of bringing a whiteboard to one of the sessions. After wasting time with her
guess-what-Human-and-Louise-mean routine, they show scenes of progress, like writing “Ian
walks” while Ian walks in front of the aliens. Wow. The main problem is, a linguist would try to do all this in the first hour, instead of looking puzzled
for days on end as the world panics.
Usually in this sort of alien encounter movie, with the
aliens possibly being a threat, we either have a scientist who knows better
than all the military people, or a military person who knows better than all
the scientists. At least, that’s how the SyFy Channel does it. We usually end
up with a lot of military people getting killed, or a lot of scientists getting
killed.
Arrival has the
novelty of what might be thought of as a liberal arts type being the person who
knows better than everyone. I thought this would be intriguing, until it became
infuriating.
Numbers are dumped on in this movie. Ian, the scientist,
talks about using prime numbers, but is ignored in that conversation. He later
talks about transmitting the Fibonacci sequence to the aliens, but Colonel
Weber angrily tells him they don’t have time to wait for the aliens to go
through calculations, and that’s the end of that idea. Who said anything about
calculations? It would be a matter of recognizing universal sequences. Granted,
it was the military guy who said this, but it is a slap in the face of anyone
who knows that numbers express universal values that would be a natural way to
attempt communication with an alien race.
What is even worse is the movie indulges in the worst
stereotypes of the military and talk radio. They show a soldier having a heartfelt
phone call with his wife or girlfriend, and we see the deep bond between them. Then he
watches some talk radio (yes, he watches it), and for no particular reason, he
decides to plant a bomb on the spaceship. He and a couple other soldiers even
fire their rifles at their fellow soldiers, willing to kill them to stop them
from getting to the bomb.
So these ignorant soldiers are easily radicalized by talk
radio. Of course the liberal arts type is so superior and noble compared to
these rabble.
Back to linguistics. The bat crazy moment comes when Louise
asks the aliens what their purpose is, and they reply, “Offer weapon.” Wow, you
wouldn’t expect the American and Russian and Chinese governments to react,
would you? The aliens actually meant, “Offer gift.” I thought the aliens were
supposed to be smart. More to the point, if they can understand abstract
language like “What is your purpose here?” or “What do you want?” do you think
they would make that horrendous a mistake with a simple noun?
When asked why they came, they reply that either three
hundred or three thousand years in the future (I can’t remember which), they
will need mankind. They elaborate that learning their language changes the
brain so that past, present, and future can all be perceived.
Wait a minute (in the present). They do not just have a
particular glimpse of a future event. They constantly perceive past, present,
and future. Then why didn’t they know a bomb would go off? Why didn’t they
already know English? In fact, why didn’t they arrive with whiteboards reading,
“Hi Louise” and “Hi Ian”?
If you liked the relationship between Louise and her
daughter, I have no criticism of that. And I like that they used “heptapod” to describe
the seven-legged aliens. Some might wonder why it wasn’t “septapod.” Septa
is the Latin prefix for seven, while hepta is the Greek.
But to sum up, Arrival
was completely illogical from start to finish. It was anti-number,
anti-military, and anti-talk radio. It presented an insultingly stupid version
of linguistics as cutting edge. And so reviewers rushed to see who could be the
first to post the word “cerebral” to describe it.
Illogical.
No comments:
Post a Comment