Arrival: Movie Review
Prof. Amy Lupin
January 2017
I’m not normally one for movies about aliens, but as a former linguistics major I knew I just had to see Arrival, a movie based on Ted Chiang’s short story, Story of Your Life.
The film centres around linguist Louise Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly as they join an elite team seeking to better understand extraterrestrials that have arrived around the world in mysterious spacecrafts. Uncertainty about these extraterrestrials, dubbed “heptapods” owing to their having seven limbs, and their intentions leads to increased tension around the world – and it soon becomes a race against time to figure this out, as more and more countries begin to feel threatened by their presence and start to act upon this.
Louise played a key role as she was to lead a team of linguists in deciphering how the heptapods communicate. She approaches this much like any other linguistics field worker, using the Swadesh list, which outlines some basic concepts. She initially attempts to tackle their spoken language (Heptapod A), but given various constraints, she refocuses her efforts on their written or visual language (Heptapod B), which consists of mesmerising swirling logograms made of smoke. Louise and her team replicate these digitally in order to aid in the daunting task of making sense of them.
I felt not enough time was spent on this part, though, as the film went from showing how they gathered basic concepts to an almost fully-fledged understanding of how the language works, complete with how the semagrams making up the logograms worked separately and together. I would have been very interested to see how Louise and her team came to have a proper working knowledge of Heptapod B, rather than having it glossed over by a narrator.
At the film’s core is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which poses the controversial idea that there is a link between language and one’s worldview. The film takes certain liberties with this. As Louise begins to grasp more and more of Heptapod B, her concept of time begins to change and appropriate the heptapod’s way of seeing events. Simply learning another language doesn’t alter a person’s worldview, however, it might lead them to appreciate certain subtleties of thought. Had a more realistic interpretation of the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis been used, it wouldn’t have made for much of a story though.
Overall, despite the mild complaints from my inner linguist, I do think the team behind Arrival got the balance between story and theory right, as the end result was quite engaging and certainly well worth watching.
I’m not normally one for movies about aliens, but as a former linguistics major I knew I just had to see Arrival, a movie based on Ted Chiang’s short story, Story of Your Life.
The film centres around linguist Louise Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly as they join an elite team seeking to better understand extraterrestrials that have arrived around the world in mysterious spacecrafts. Uncertainty about these extraterrestrials, dubbed “heptapods” owing to their having seven limbs, and their intentions leads to increased tension around the world – and it soon becomes a race against time to figure this out, as more and more countries begin to feel threatened by their presence and start to act upon this.
Louise played a key role as she was to lead a team of linguists in deciphering how the heptapods communicate. She approaches this much like any other linguistics field worker, using the Swadesh list, which outlines some basic concepts. She initially attempts to tackle their spoken language (Heptapod A), but given various constraints, she refocuses her efforts on their written or visual language (Heptapod B), which consists of mesmerising swirling logograms made of smoke. Louise and her team replicate these digitally in order to aid in the daunting task of making sense of them.
I felt not enough time was spent on this part, though, as the film went from showing how they gathered basic concepts to an almost fully-fledged understanding of how the language works, complete with how the semagrams making up the logograms worked separately and together. I would have been very interested to see how Louise and her team came to have a proper working knowledge of Heptapod B, rather than having it glossed over by a narrator.
At the film’s core is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which poses the controversial idea that there is a link between language and one’s worldview. The film takes certain liberties with this. As Louise begins to grasp more and more of Heptapod B, her concept of time begins to change and appropriate the heptapod’s way of seeing events. Simply learning another language doesn’t alter a person’s worldview, however, it might lead them to appreciate certain subtleties of thought. Had a more realistic interpretation of the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis been used, it wouldn’t have made for much of a story though.
Overall, despite the mild complaints from my inner linguist, I do think the team behind Arrival got the balance between story and theory right, as the end result was quite engaging and certainly well worth watching.