Arrival Review: 10 Reasons It's An Instant Classic
2. The Representation Of Linguistics Is Astoundingly Complex
What makes Arrival so fresh in the first contact genre is its approach to the method of contacting aliens. Safe to say, Villeneuve's made Close Encounters' Simon Says looks painfully naive.
Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor who becomes America's chief alien translator, trying to decipher their strange glyphs and grunts to ascertain their purpose. The first part of the movie is breaking down and reassembling the understanding of the question "What is your purpose on Earth?"
This isn't just a plot element to enter the story from a new angle, however, but an essential part of the film's discussion: How much is language a cultural construct and how much does it actually affect the way we think? There's a haunting suggestion here we see in our own world with how different languages approach things like colour, pushed to the extreme, and it's incredibly thought-provoking.