The Conundrum of Epistemic Arrival

Rating: 9/10 (22 September 2018)

Everybody dies, right? Near the midway point of Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, physicist Ian Donnelly quips this thought to colleague Louise Banks amidst the smoky, enigmatic chamber of their alien subjects. Little does he know this very idea will come back to influence the remaining course of his life.
Arrival touches on a great many topics of intellectual and philosophical interest, including language acquisition, parenthood, mortality, political communication, and freedom of will. Centered around the work of two individuals to decode the purpose and mechanism of alien lifeforms, their results are more than applicable to life here on Earth. Although a touch too overt in some of the expository elements of the film, as seen when Dr. Banks wastes 30 seconds explaining the function of a whiteboard, or through strained, cheesy dialogue between Ian, Louise, and Colonel Weber throughout, the content subject matter itself captivates the audience with enough subplots to retain a wide audience.
Symbolically, the descent of the heptapods and the looming presence of their ship serves to constantly remind our characters of inevitable death. The heptapods resemble claw-like creatures and live in a misty, white environment, poised to snatch up the mortal humans into their purgatorial atmosphere. In a sequence of cuts between Hannah's death and Louise's experience of them in the audience's frame of temporality, Louise is depicted literally looking over her shoulder at the looming ship, representative of humans' near constant anxiety about the pervasiveness of mortality.
In a brief exchange between the two protagonists, the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativism, which lays the basis for the entire conclusion, is introduced forwardly. In this theory, the weak hypothesis claims that language categories influence thoughts and behavior; the strong hypothesis posits that language determine and limit cognitive categories. Such a distinction effectively compliments Louise's internal conflict to "embrace" a future that she has already experienced. When she asks Ian about the decision to influence the events of the "future", namely Hannah's death and their eventual marriage (to which he is completely oblivious), she fails to consider whether she even has agency to do so, as she has already experienced them in a non-linear timeline. The "gift" is not only an ability to predict events like Laplace's Demon, but rather to experience them simultaneously; otherwise, she would've been unable to leverage knowledge from her conversation with Shang in the "future" timeline.
While her attitude has ties to Camus' Sisyphus, Martin Heidegger's concept of being-toward-death is encapsulated coherently. Heidegger spoke of a unity between all three time states of time: past, present, and future. To find a true joy and freedom, he proposes a non-linear, non-traditional view of time in regard to our mortality; to live in light of our death. Villeneuve himself commented on the film's meaning to him in an interview with The Verge:
"I know I'm going to die. I have three kids. What can happen right now? I need to trust life, I need to embrace life...That's the way I see it, personally. For me, the movie was about a woman having a new relationship with death and changing her perspective on her own life."
Despite limited flaws in chemistry between principal characters, a lack of dynamic development of Ian or Louise, and unnecessary plot addition of a political standoff, Arrival addresses areas of scholarly interest through a accessible, heart-wrenching, blockbuster lens, inviting intellectuals and laypeople alike to spend near two hours in a world of atemporal possibilities.