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In many of the biggest science fiction franchises, conversing with alien races is an absolute doddle. In “Star Trek“, universal translators come as standard, while C-3PO has spent the last 49 years reminding everyone in “Star Wars” that he’s fluent in over six million forms of communication.
But in “Arrival” — which was released 10 years ago in November 2016 — making first contact proves to be rather more challenging than maintaining your Duolingo streak. In fact, working out how to establish a dialogue with extraterrestrial visitors becomes the whole point of this powerful and heartbreaking story, as the fate of planet Earth hinges on the interpretation of a single noun.
The film’s journey to the big screen began when a screenwriter best known for his work on horror franchises such as “Final Destination”, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “The Thing” read a short story in an online magazine. Eric Heisserer was so impressed by Ted Chiang’s “Understand” that he bought himself a collection of the author’s short stories. One in particular, the Nebula Award-winning “Story of Your Life”, piqued his interest.
“It had a very profound emotional effect on me,” he reminisced to Deadline. “I was in tears, and I was both heartbroken and uplifted. My head was just full of big ideas. I had to walk around the block a couple of times afterward and just hug my friends. The next day, I was like, ‘Oh god, I want to give this to other people.'”
So when 21 Laps (the production company that later went on to make “Stranger Things“) invited Heisserer to discuss possible future projects, the writer mentioned “Story of Your Life”. The producers were also smitten.
“I was so excited, but I had that dread that a lot of producers get, which is, ‘Are the rights available?'” 21 Laps’ Dan Levine told the Hollywood Gold podcast. “You read something that blows you away, and then you find there aren’t the rights, and there’s no chance, you have to move on. So we were trying to track down this Ted Chiang, and he had no agent. He had a day job. He was impossible to find, so we started the hunt for Ted Chiang.”
An up-and-coming Canadian director named Denis Villeneuve had also found his way on to 21 Laps’ radar after his 2010 French-language drama “Incendies” earned rave reviews and an Academy Award nomination. He told the producers that he’d always wanted to direct a science fiction film — a hint of things to come? — and they showed him “Story of Your Life”.
He was also drawn to the story, while the now-located Chiang was suitably impressed by the director’s work on “Incendies” to make a deal for the rights. And with Amy Adams also interested in playing the lead role of linguist Dr Louise Banks, the film that would eventually become “Arrival” was ready to proceed — or, at least, it would be once Villeneuve had completed his first three Hollywood movies, “Prisoners” (2013), “Enemy” (2013) and “Sicario” (2015).
With 12 alien spaceships arriving simultaneously around the globe, “Arrival”‘s poster-friendly elevator pitch could almost have been borrowed from “Independence Day“. Indeed, the question of whether these whisper-quiet, chocolate button-shaped craft belong to the “Day the Earth Stood Still” / “Close Encounters” friendly extraterrestrial camp, or have the invasion of planet Earth on their minds is a mystery the world’s governments are desperate to solve.
“Denis didn’t really see this as an alien invasion movie — more an alien arrival movie,” producer Aaron Ryder told SFX magazine. “What would be the protocols that were in place? How would they be implemented? How would people react? What would the government be doing? What would the news organisations be saying? That was the tone and the texture, which is established right up front.”
These Hollywood blockbuster components were not part of “Story of Your Life”. But even though Heisserer’s script was not a direct translation of Chiang’s tale, he retained the most important bits — namely Dr Banks’ efforts to establish a means of communication with seven-legged extraterrestrial heptapods, and the profound effect their language has on her perception of time.
Designed by Carlos Huante, the heptapods themselves are like giant elongated hands, alien visitors light years away from the “Star Trek” tradition of actors with a few ridges glued to their foreheads. Like the evil 456 in “Torchwood: Children of Earth“, they’re enclosed in gaseous chambers and make sounds imperceptible to the human ear.
This, however, is where “Arrival” gets really interesting. Working alongside physicist colleague Dr Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Banks gradually exchanges foundational vocabulary with two heptapods they name Abbott and Costello. They discover that the alien visitors use a sophisticated written language of circular “logograms”, squirted into their atmosphere as if it were sentient squid ink.
“The idea in the short story is of circular language that has no beginning and no end,” Villeneuve explained in an interview with IndieWire. “We were looking for no relation to any human language. I had to figure out how to produce logograms from my aliens while avoiding being long and boring. The sounds were an expression of their emotions, with more intellect coming from the signs. This beautiful species uses written language as their first means of expression instead of movement or gesture. They produce words out of their bodies.”
But Banks and Donnelly’s research project has a purpose. With the world’s military on high alert — and, ironically, struggling to communicate — they need to work out how to ask the aliens a fundamental question: Why are you here?
The heptapods’ answer — “offer weapon” — is tantalizingly ambiguous. Are they planning to attack? Or is, as Banks suggests, ‘weapon’ simply being used as a synonym for ‘tool’?
SPOILERS AHEAD
Aside from a bomb planted on the heptapod ship by a rogue US soldier, “Arrival” is mostly free from the big-budget explosions that are part-and-parcel of most alien visitation movies. Instead, the film’s denouement delivers a twist — the crux of Chiang’s story — that rivals “The Sixth Sense”, “Fight Club” and “The Prestige” in its audacious sleight of hand.
It turns out the “weapon” in question is actually the heptapod language, which, thanks to their non-linear perception of time, gives speakers a unique perspective on the past, present, and future. Therefore, those scenes we assumed to be flashbacks to the life and tragic death of Louise’s daughter, Hannah, are actually flashforwards, as her increased understanding of heptapod-speak gives her memories of a life she hasn’t yet lived.
Villeneuve put on multiple test screenings to ensure the big reveals hit properly.
“I wanted to screen it with people who knew nothing about the project,” he said. “What we discovered is when someone in the audience felt too lost — if intellectually they were not engaged — the ending was less powerful from an emotional point of view. So we tried to give as few clues as possible, but enough clues to be able to stay engaged and follow the story.”
Those subtle hints become obvious on second and third viewings, whether it’s a lingering shot of a wedding ring absent in the movie’s “present” or a conversation about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the notion that the structure of a language can influence the way its speakers think). The absence of young Hannah’s father also takes on tragic new meaning when we realize it’s Ian, who’ll leave after Louise tells him about their daughter’s sad fate.
“We were walking on this tightrope of trying to play things so it could play both ways, because of the reveal at the end,” Adams recalled in a Vanity Fair conversation with Villeneuve. “I had to do so much work to understand how I play a character so that the first time you watch it you think that it’s one thing, and the second time you watch it you can see it from a totally different perspective.”
While Adams didn’t get the Oscar nomination her performance deserved, everything else paid off, with the film making over $200 million worldwide from its reported $47 million budget. (The film did win an Academy Award for sound editing, while receiving further nods for best picture, director, and adapted screenplay.)
Villeneuve has famously gone on to become Hollywood’s go-to guy for intelligent sci-fi, thanks to “Blade Runner 2049” and the smash-hit “Dune” saga, and will next be given the opportunity to resurrect James Bond.
Normally we’d take this opportunity to say no one could have foreseen Villeneuve’s subsequent ascendancy but — in a story involving heptapods and some clever people at 21 Laps — who can be so sure?
“Arrival” is available to stream on Paramount+ in the US, and Netflix in the UK.. It’s also available on Blu-ray via Amazon.