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ARRIVAL

                                                  March 2, 2017     
                                                                    
                                      "Arrival" is also the title of the first
"Arrival" (2016):                     episode of "The Prisoner", but that's
                                      not what I'm thinking about at present.
There's a lot to like                                   
about this movie.                                       
                                                        
  This is a movie to a large extent about mental activity,
  this is a story about a scientist engaged in scientific
  work.  They actually show some of this, and it looks  
  plausible: going over diagrams, cataloging features,  
  doing computer data analyses, arguing about the right 
  things to try next...                                 
                                                        
                                                        
  It's a movie which to an very large extent                  POV
  follows a single viewpoint: the temptation in         
  movies is to cut around and show us various           
  scenes the main character does not know about--     There's one except-
  I've always (since I was around 15) felt that       ion: a voice-over
  this is a mistake: it's a cop-out that kills        lecture filling us
  the story, and undermines identification with       in on the basic
  the lead point-of-view.                             situation.  That's
                                                      in the male main
         I've seen the complaint-- I think in a       characters voice.
         Jane Fonda interview-- that there are          
         no movies that try to follow a female          
         character through every moment of her          
         life in the way that, say, the movie           
         "Harper" does for a male character,            
         where we see Harper wake-up in the             
         morning, struggle with making coffee,          
         and so on.  I don't imagine that               
         "Arrival" is the first counter-example         
         of doing this with a female character,         
         but it's definitely an excellent               
         example.                                       
                                                        
   The script is fairly tight, in nearly any way you    
   can think of-- the aliens perception of time is      
   reflected in the main character's perception of       
   time, there's a Twist Ending where what we thought   
   were flashbacks turn out to be flash-forwards,       
   and that's reasonably well integrated into the       
   overall theme.                                        
                                                         
                                                                           
        This is not, however, a remarkably                                      
        *creative* movie: most if not all         E.g. the paranoid military   
        of it's elements are reassembled          mindset vs the reasonable 
        tropes familiar from other sources.       scientists.               
                                                        
                                                        
        The one exception being the Samuel R. Delany    
        novel, "Babel-17", which I don't think you             BABEL-17
        could call "familiar": most of the audience is      
        probably unaware of it.  The script author might 
        not even know it, it could be this film is an    
        independent recreation of many of it's ideas.       
                                                             CAUTIONARY
            After all, once you get interested in           
            "the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" and have the       
            idea to incorporate it in an SF story,          
            what else would you do except to exaggerate    
            (romanticize?) the magnitude of the effect, 
            and have an new language that acts as a         
            magic talisman, supplying you with unforseen
            mental capabilities...                          
                                                            

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