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
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
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
“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
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,