A Film Review . . . A Gift From Space Shows Future Suffering, But Evokes Courage

By DEXTER DUGGAN

Does beauty lead to bad results? It can. That’s how sinful temptation lures one in. Does unsightliness lead to good results? It can. There was no comeliness in our Lord on Good Friday, but His sacrifice held the key to our salvation.
We’re drawn instinctively to the attractive because it’s appealing, and we may intuit it as some spark of the divine. The good angels are beings of heavenly light and loveliness. But a distressful broken and bleeding victim may stir our compassion and impel us to extend virtuous healing assistance.
Still, what would seem to be a highly encouraging messenger can raise doubts. When a glorious angel from God asked a Jewish girl to become mother of the Messiah, Mary was troubled. She had to be assured, “Fear not.”
What if a science-fiction movie were to present awful-looking creatures from space who intend to do us good? That’s a key element in Arrival, released November 11 from Paramount Pictures. What if one of the creatures’ gifts unlocks knowledge of the future to an intrepid linguist, who has the courage to choose it even though it discloses suffering?
Actually, any time a baby comes into the world, we know there’ll be suffering as well as joy along the way, and inevitable death at the end of a lifespan, even if not reached until after decades have passed. But, beyond that, the hope of Heaven.
So maybe the movie’s linguist, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is really an Everywoman and Everyman, even though she gets an edge over the rest of us as to seeing exactly what some suffering will be.
Arrival isn’t a religious movie in a conventional sense, but its message still can serve as lessons for life.
Political liberals also may see the movie as encouragement to work together instead of jumping to angry conclusions and grabbing for weapons. Conservatives may reply that if every ugly space creature wanted to promote humanity’s happiness and welfare, that would be a big improvement over Earth’s unfortunately plain history of a parade of torturers, totalitarians, and other madmen.
Strangely, although people having to learn communications arts is important to the theme of Arrival, the movie is ambiguous enough that different reviewers have a conflicting understanding of a crucial event, the timing of the life and death of Dr. Banks’ ill-fated daughter, who passes away at teen-age.
Because we see scenes of Banks with her daughter early in the story, some reviewers think this means the linguist is still mourning her death when 12 huge space vehicles arrive to hover around the globe.
Instead, Banks, who had no daughter, uses her ability to learn the unknown explorers’ language. This opens her mind to uncovering another mystery, seeing what is to come.
As a perceptive review at the NPR website by Marcelo Gleiser on November 23 said:
“Dr. Banks’ brain reshapes itself as she cracks the strange iconographic language of the visiting ‘heptapods,’ whose language is made out of inky, black, loop-shaped blots that resemble Rorschach-test forms. . . . She can see the future. She sees her life with her daughter before it happens, her relationships, her triumphs and her losses.”
Reviewer Kyle Smith wrote in the New York Post on November 19: “Suddenly, Louise knows that she will have a child in the future and, when she does, things will go awry. But instead of changing her fate and abstaining from motherhood, she goes ahead anyway. At the same time, the viewer realizes that the movie’s earlier scenes of Louise with her daughter are actually set in the future — and this is a tragic path she has chosen to take.
“In so doing,” Smith continued, “she becomes a pro-life figure for the ages, a stand-in for all those brave mothers who give birth to children they know through prenatal testing are destined to be born with untreatable diseases.”
LifeNews.com added on November 21 that the film emphasizes “the value of every human life, no matter how long that life is. Adams’ role as Louise Banks is a beautiful example of why parents always have a reason to choose life for a child.”
Because it’s fiction, science fiction can take what path it chooses. The space craft can be mystical-looking (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977), sleek and death-spewing (The War of the Worlds, 1953), or functionally futuristic (Star Trek series). The creature might be an inquisitive humanoid, a reptilian malignity, or something else.
In Arrival, the craft is at least 1,500 feet tall, a newscaster says. It’s charcoal-colored and just as featureless on the exterior as a lump of that substance.
Instead of hovering horizontally, it points itself silently downward, with one end about 15 feet above the ground then towering stationary high above. Sort of like a blimp with its nose straight down. We focus on the one in Montana, but the 11 elsewhere on the globe look similar.
Urging Banks into joining the investigation, the military’s Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker) barks, “Priority One. What do they want? Where are they from?” The future of Earth is at stake.
We hear that the other 11 sites also are doing their investigations, but we don’t see how they go about this. In typical American hands-on fashion, a military base camp is set up near the Montana craft. Lucky that the huge piece of charcoal just hangs there instead of shooting out death rays.
Banks and the small team that accompanies her are informed the craft has a door on the bottom that opens once every 18 hours. The next time it opens, they go in wearing orange protective gear. Lucky, also, that the craft doesn’t simply fly away after having trapped the human specimens it could want for experiments.
The team ascends to a lighted area. Breathable air, not poisons. Did the space creatures do some prior biological research so they knew what wouldn’t harm the humans?
The earthlings are on one side of a huge transparent wall; two of the creatures emerge on the other side. One reviewer compared them to huge squid. I thought a bit of octopuses, maybe 20 feet high, standing up using their tentacles as legs. In any event, not attractive, except maybe to another octopus.
One of them shoots an inky substance from his/her foot, if that’s what the appendage is, that forms basically a circle with curlicues. That’s the written language Banks has to crack.
The NPR review by Gleiser explained: “The heptapods came to give humans gifts, to share their technologies, so that humans, 3,000 years in the future, could return the favor and help them in their time of need. They came to help elevate humans to a higher moral level, a level of cosmic alliance and friendship that makes current bickering and destructive competitive behavior seem ridiculous — red ants endlessly fighting black ants to no real gain.”
That might be a liberal, “Can’t we all just get along?” interpretation. But it’s true that the heptapods didn’t come to stir up strife among mankind. However, the danger of global violence looms when the Chinese military — specifically identified in the movie as the People’s Liberation Army, the Communist war machine — decides it has to attack the craft.
We later see Chinese Gen. Shang (Tzi Ma) thanking Banks for calling his private number to warn him against taking hostile action. We could be left with the dubious impression that the entire Communist military structure follows this officer’s word.
A review by Bryan Bishop at MSN Entertainment concluded: “The promise of overcoming that inability to communicate — not just with aliens, but with one another — is what lies at the heart of the film, and it’s an idea that’s brought forward most directly by Amy Adams’ performance.”
In any event, we’re told early in Arrival, “Language is the foundation of civilization.” Maybe that, plus love, heroism, and sacrifice.