The Power of Language

Rating: 10/10 (5 April 2020)

There's a very old idea, that's also a constant theme of life seen throughout history. The idea that life involves a certain amount of suffering and that the best way to act in those circumstances is to accept that suffering willingly. These ideas have been carried across time into the future not only through language, but also through abstraction in the form of art, images and music. A good representation of this idea of the inevitable suffering that surrounds being is Mary holding her dead son, Jesus, in her arms. No mother should have to bear through this, but one of the most sacred images in the western world involves this representation. A good question would be why? Well, maybe it's that Mary literally embraces her suffering and does it willingly as well.
Arrival shares many similar themes and I believe them to be a cornerstone of the film's message. Amy Adam's character, after she discovers, let's say, the eternal language, a language that if you understand it, it no longer involves seeing time as linear, she realizes her daughter will die of a rare disease when she's about a teenager. This is also a brilliant plot twist in the film, since we are expertly led to believe through most of it that her ideas about her daughter are from the past, and not from the future. Near the end of the film, she asks her future husband "If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?". To which Ian responds "Maybe I'd say what I felt more often." Now, Amy Adams' character at this point realizes that the imminent suffering of life is worth accepting, so she goes through with it, even though she knows that it will end in misery. But she also knows that the journey with her daughter and the memories created by that will be the thing that will transcend time, not the actual suffering created by her death.
During the first act of the film, when both main characters meet for the first time, one of them being a linguist and the other being a physicist, sort of have the argument of "The cornerstone of civilization isn't language, it's science.", explained by the theoretical physicist, played by Jeremy Renner. I think the film brilliantly proves his hypothesis to be wrong merely through the events that occur in the movie and without explicitly saying it with words. It becomes clear and more clear the more you get towards the end of the film that some problems cannot be solved through science, but through language and sometimes even that cannot be the case. Sometimes, only abstract representations, such as the symbols that the aliens create, can fully explain and maybe even solve a problem of communication.
I think the entire movie is really something else, but the complete first act of the film, from the point it begins to when they have their first encounter with the aliens, that really is some next level film making and cinematography. Truly genius level directing by Villeneuve and photography by Bradford Young. They do an excellent job throughout, not just during the first act, of the will to face the unknown and to act as bravely as you possibly can in dire circumstances.
Arrival is a brilliant film, one of my personal favorites and truly a statement of what can be achieved through filmmaking.