“Like a Finnegans Wake for everybody, Arrival plays with both language and narrative circularity, upsetting our expectations of beginnings and endings.”
“Banks’s initial motivation for helping the military decipher the aliens’ inscrutable language is to best her rival, Professor Danvers at Berkeley. She does so by asking whether he knows the Sanskrit word for “war” and its etymology. It’s a telling question. Danvers thinks the word, gavisti, comes from “argument,” when the right answer is “a desire for more cows.” In other words, “war” has a fundamentally pecuniary (from the Latin pecu, cattle) meaning, and one that we would suspect a person named Banks to know intimately.”
“But the mathiness, the seeming exactitude of its scientific signage, is not what makes Arrival effective. Arrival is effective because it knows that the whiteboard contains some nonsense, and Banks erases much of it (Donnelly exclaims, “No, no, no, not the top!”). She then writes the core problem of the movie in the blank space in a nod to high concept: “What is your purpose on Earth?” It’s hokey, of course — we are of course supposed to ask ourselves the same thing. And the scene works not because of the rudimentary invitation to philosophize, but for demonstrating how philosophy and indeed all analysis starts. It is a pedagogical moment seamlessly embedded in the reality of the narrative — the formal antithesis of the didactic interludes in The Big Short — and this is not “pop-science” at all. This is real reading: this is critical inquiry based on close reading.”
“Per Connor, a movie, then, is the “home of collective reflection, where competing visions of the current industrial configuration can play out.””
“They were aware of how it was all going to turn out, and their gentleness in treating humanity, even for all of our flaws and all of our misbehaviors, was really a source of inspiration. I built, basically, with Abbott and Costello, two of the greatest motivational speakers I could.”
“And the limits of human language, of human conceptions of time, are also the limits of cinema — a fundamentally time-based and therefore unidirectional medium. The Heptapods’ circular logograms, with their multi-directional representation of time, become Banks’s daughter’s name (the anagram Hannah), become the narrative beginning and ending at more or less the same place, become the repetition of the slow tilt down from the ceiling of Banks’s home that begins the first and final sequences. None of this is perfect circularity or full transcendence of the linearity of time. It is only an intimation thereof. But this is as close as a human mind, ultimately incapable of full attainment of Heptapod fluency, can get. Transforming a generic flaw into a narrative and formal strength is the movie’s stroke of brilliance.”