The movie presents relations between communication, technology and globalization

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2019)

In the film "The Arrival", is raised the question of how our globalized world would react after the unexpected visit of strange speakers of a strange language, called heptapods. The linguist Louise Banks is called to decipher what the purpose of the visitors is.
The first sight of the globalization process on the subject is when Louise enters the command center, where several video monitors are running, each one with a representative of the countries where there were landings. It is a great conference where each nation would update the other on what each one has learned about the pretensions of the aliens. That way, the tecnology is indeed shortening distances and promoting cooperation between nations, as the ideal of globalization intends .
However, this harmony is short-lived: when they discover the offer of a "weapon" to be shared with Earth, the line of communication is cut off and some countries isolate themselves with bellicose proposals. And the borders close again. Also, the US military is reluctant to accept Banks's theories, who says that "we need to teach the difference between a weapon and a tool. Things can be confusing when the same object can be used in both ways." The cause of the desunity among the nations is, however, only a matter of misinterpretation of the new language: the "weapon" was the ability to have a new vision about time, given as a gift to the Terrans because the Heptapods would need our help three thousand years from now.
In the film, the linguist makes it clear that language is a bridge, a possibility to live with the other, that the other can be understood in the light of multiculturality. Unfortunately, at the moment of crisis the possibilities of union are forgotten and the world takes a defensive attitude against the heptapods, demonstrating the fallibility of communication between nations, even in a planet that is globalized.
Drawing a parallel from the film to actual events, we can see that it portrays the importance of communication in world politics and, tied to it, technology as a (dis)service to human relations. The criticism made in the film can be understood as the fact that humans have more difficulty understanding each other than to understand a completely new language and no phonemes related to spelling. Turning to technology, which provides all the necessary means for communication between people, it is clear that it is commanded by something not so interested in globalizing the world in an ideal way, but in the ways pointed out by Brazilian geographer Milton Santos: globalization as fable and perversity.
Because of all of those aspects, this movie is very efficient when shows that technology may help communications and a fair globalization, but this process is delayed by the selfishness of the nations. And as happened in the movie, was only overcomed after a new view of time - here almost as a superpower - used by Louise to convince the Chinese leader to be cooperative.