An Intelligent Sci-fi Look at Communicating with Aliens

Rating: 8/10 (26 October 2019)

"Arrival" depicts the arrival of multiple spaceships that land at various places on Earth (including Montana), and the resulting attempts of each nation where the ships have landed to communicate with the extraterrestrials and ascertain their intentions. The U.S. military authorities hire a Professor of Linguistics and a Professor of Theoretical Physics to identify the vocabulary and meaning of the aliens' strange language of complex visual configurations, and the linguist (Amy Adams) becomes the center of focus in this film. "Arrival" is decidedly not a "space opera" as it is a thoughtful, well-researched exploration of communication "mediums" between living beings who know nothing of each other. "The day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) took the easy route by having the lone alien communicate in English (presumably picked up by monitoring radio traffic); "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" used musical notes to get the terrestrials and extraterrestrials in synch; Carl Sagan's "Contact" used a repeating sequence of prime numbers to signify a living intelligence (It is fun to note that the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 contained the "Voyager Golden Records" that contained, with much input from Sagan, mathematical formulas like the derivation of Pi, plus chemical structures, not to mention 55 ancient and modern languages).
The Aliens do not apparently use a phonetic alphabet as their written language, featured in the film, is distinct from their spoken language. I have three final comments to make about this film: (1) I give intellectual heft to this film by its invoking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, namely that the structure of a language determines how you think and experience the world. The Aliens' language moves in circles and thus they have a circular, not linear, view of time. The irony is that this hypothesis is now discredited by Noam Chomsky and modern linguists who argue that all languages have a common grammatical structure. But of course, who's to say how our extraterrestrials' brains evolved? (2) Why do these films, including "Arrival," have military types who think early 21st century weaponry is sufficient to destroy creatures who are capable of interstellar travel? (3) For that matter, what on earth do these aliens, presumably so far advanced beyond our capabilities, think we could do for them in 3,000 years?