Mini-Cast #16 The Re-Arrival Part IV - first third

Warning: Here be massive spoilers.

So what then... what has arrived in Arrival?

Like I said last week, it's not a great movie by the metrics of Sarris and Kaufmann, or even Kael, but those film critiques were critiquing for another era more influenced by old notions, they wouldn't have understood the future - even if I wonder whether many of their predecessors of the 19th century would. Many reviewers thought the movie ineffably moving and human - moving it absolutely is, it seems to levitate from beginning to end in a state of grace almost Christian. But human? Most definitely not. Even the surprises are unsurprising, the characters behave not as human beings but servants to plot devices. But what a plot...

In the face of a plot this overwhelmingly mystical, the kind of fully realized and evolving characters one gets in Ozu and Altman would only get in the way. The point of movies like this is not the people, but the metaphysical states of mind to which people are capable of ascending.

What makes Arrival much more than a mere gimmick is not the twist ending, it's the nature of the idea it posits. An idea whose baroque grandeur is matched by the romantic magnificence of the visual way it conveys it.

The aliens in Arrival, the squid-like heptopods, communicate with an alphabet written in the vaporous ink they secrete, an alphabet that looks much like Eastern calligraphy. Like Chinese and Japanese, their written language is pictographic, but the pictographs are so nuanced that when computers processes the data of their language, each word comes up with the potential to mean a relative infinity of words, because as it turns out, their pictographs are so complex that each letter conveys an entire sentence. A particularly knowledgeable listener will immediately hear the kinship in this idea to what's probably the most famous story by Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius. But this idea takes this Borgesian concept to its next logical step, and discovers a visual style to match its vastly magnified sublimity.