MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN | Washington Post The extraterrestrial “heptapods” at the center of the new sci-fi thriller “Arrival” aren’t the only strange, poorly understood creatures in the film. The other aliens, it turns out, are linguists, represented by Amy Adams’s Dr. Louise Banks, an academic field researcher who is recruited by U.S. military intelligence to help communicate with a race of seven-legged E.T.s that have descended on Earth, with intentions unclear, from another world. “A lot of people don’t know what linguists do, or even that we exist, apart from some…
Month: November 2016
‘Arrival’: word of warcraft
By Sudhir Srinivasan Cinema is beautiful for how it allows us to safely experience the dangerous lives of many. In that sense, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival has provided me with perhaps the best vicarious experience I’ve had in a movie theatre for a long time now. It shows exactly how an average person will likely react to an UFO in the neighbourhood, how they will feel when approaching an alien. As Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams in a sensationally understated and effective portrayal of a linguist) stands dwarfed by the towering egg-shaped…
Arrival contemplates language in light of eternity
BY C.S. MORRISSEY In Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) learns not just how to read and write the language of alien visitors to Earth. She also finds herself thinking, and even dreaming, in that same extraterrestrial language. I love this story because it captures the excitement of learning an unfamiliar and mysterious language. I like to explore the thought-worlds of ancient Greek, Latin, and Chinese. Learning a language changes the way you think, as new pathways are opened up to you. Louise herself comes to learn what the film…
How ‘Arrival’s’ “Cerebral” Script Made Its Long Journey to the Screen
“I got a lot of blank looks,” says Eric Heisserer, who spent years pitching producers his screenplay about language, free will and destiny. Arrival is an apt title for a film that has journeyed long and far to get to the big screen. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer spent years wrestling to turn a brainy, emotional science fiction story, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (from the 2002 book Stories of Your Life and Others), into a cinematic thriller. He spent more years unsuccessfully pitching it to producers and studio executives who…
Decoding the linguistic geekiness behind ‘Arrival’s’ sci-fi sheen
By Steven Zeitchik [Helpful note: This article assumes a knowledge of, and reveals details from, the plot of “Arrival.” Read at your own risk.] Large-scale Hollywood films employ a wide range of consultants, from ER doctors to military experts to veteran constitutional lawyers. Rare is the big-budget adventure, however, that retains a linguist specializing in syntax, morphology, ergativity and nominalization. As moviegoers have turned out to see “Arrival” — Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral alien-invader adventure has grossed $50 million in two weeks of release — many have been struck by the language symbols…