Inconsistent

Rating: 5/10 (6 December 2016)

Okay, I'm going to make a hyperbole here: imagine that you are trying to intermediate peace negotiations and break the language barrier between humans and an alien race. At one moment you understand the aliens saying "death to all humans", but maybe this is not what they said. Maybe you got it wrong, maybe "death" has a different nuance in alien language. Then you turn to the US Army and say "They said they want to kill all humans". As the soldiers run to their weapons and tanks you try to stop them because you don't know exactly what they mean. If you don't want to start a war that was a great opportunity to keep your mouth shut!
All my linguist friends were talking about how excited they were about this movie, which revolves around a linguist trying to decipher the language of the first alien race to ever attempt to make contact with humanity. It all seemed very bold and creative, and the trailer images of Amy Adams taking notes on cool looking circular scripts looked very promising.
But it became obvious that cool looking scripts were the only good idea in this movie. It is filled with plot holes and fillers that try to convey a deeper meaning that does not exist.
I'm only going to talk about the part that first attracted me to the movie, which was the linguistic part. So a US Army Colonel decides that this specific linguist, Louise Banks, is the chosen one in all America to intermediate humanity's first contact with an alien race, because a few years ago she translated a Farsi conversation. Even if you ignore the fact that almost every university in the world have Farsi classes, Farsi belongs to the same language family English does, and is easier to learn than more popular languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, and Arabic. The only other thing we get to know about her is that she is a college professor. Is she a renowned and published scholar? Maybe... nobody cares, she speaks Farsi so it will have to do.
And so the Colonel shows her what appears to be the alien spoken language. And later comes a scene when Louise repeatedly listens to the excerpt of alien conversation, and it almost looks like she's getting somewhere. And the next day she comes and says, "You know what? Let's forget their spoken language altogether". It looked like the producers wanted to develop something in this area, but gave up, and this scene of Louise attentively trying to figure out alien speak slipped through editing. Eventually Louise finds out that the alien spoken and written language are completely disconnected. How the hell does she find that out if she doesn't even attempt to learn the spoken language? And moreover, using a written language that doesn't represent the spoken language is as exotic and alien as medieval universities publishing in Latin rather than the local language.
And so the rest of the movie revolves around Louise trying to decipher the alien written language. She is placed as the leader of a team of people, who I suppose are there to operate the printer that prints the alien letters for Louise to examine. And even ignoring the spoken language the producers fail to offer a cohesive theory about the script. At one moment they decide that one circle means an entire sentence full of complexity, and that every little blotch has a meaning. At other moments an entire circle actually means only one word. As exotic and intriguing as this alien script first seems, it's actually not very thought through.
Basically she learns the language by writing English on a white board and getting an alien translation in return. At the end Louise acquires the alien language, and with it entirely new cognitive concepts that allow her to see through time, which supposedly borrows from the Sapir-Whorf theory. Then you need a huge suspension of disbelief to connect the dots and imagine that, even though everything she learned from the aliens was based on her own input, she is very smart and managed to figure out all the alien's mysterious new concepts which gave her superpowers.
She is able to get a glimpse a future where she writes and publishes a book that teaches the alien language. So in the future everyone who reads her book will have superpowers! Many people, including many of the movie characters who were trying to bomb the aliens would in the future be able to see their lives from beginning to end and choose not to make the stupid decisions they've made! You know what, I shouldn't overthink about this movie.