The Beauty of Arrival is in Watching it a Second Time

Note: this essay contains spoilers. Come back when you've watched the film.

After viewing Denis Villeneuve's Arrival for the first time, I was floored. Based on a short story by Ted Chiang, titled Story of Your Life, Arrival is an achievement in science fiction. It manages to exhibit the qualities of the best examples of the genre; as it bridges the wonder and scope of an extraterrestrial first contact and a deeply human and personal story. Even if the scenarios grow even more otherworldly and magical, at its core it reveals something about ourselves. It's also a film about communication and language, and ultimately, the power of film as a language in itself.

Its structure is different from the usual science fiction invasion storyline where aliens, usually malevolent, attack the earth en masse ala Independence Day. The titular Arrival, where aliens called Heptapods visit Earth, is a mystery that builds up slowly, yet surely towards a conclusion... or at least, that's how I thought of it at first. There was something about the film that always bothered me during my first time watching - the first sequence of Amy Adams and her young daughter, Hannah, who dies during adolescence. At first, the scene was baffling, seemingly out of place. Like many have noted, its a scene that ends up playing with your expectations, evidence of the film trying to communicate ideas with your head, shaping your reality. It's a genius move from Villeneuve, and its something I haven't seen a lot (if at all) in Hollywood in recent years.

We eventually learn that the Heptapods' conception of time is circular, with no beginning or end; a deterministic concept following Fermat's Principle of Least Time. And here's where the magic of the movie begins. I watched the film again recently and that exact same sequence at the beginning was playing. But this time, armed with the knowledge of how the film ends, the scene made me as emotional as the similar sequence near the end of the film. 

Positioned back to back, two viewings of Arrival make it loop around on itself, the Amy Adams-Hannah sequences acting as links from one viewing of the film to another. It's reflected not only in the structure of the plot, but in looping camera movements, music, design choices, aesthetic characteristics. For example, seldom do we see a linear tracking shot; the camera often curves gently, or is placed at one focus. We realize, just like explorers realizing the world is round, the shape of the film, becoming circular in our minds. And with the knowledge of the future events of the film, during the second (and subsequent) viewings of the film, we, the viewers, are made to think exactly the same way as the Heptapods do.

In the world of Arrival, the one thing that can cause this shift in thinking is language; the film follows the concepts of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, where language shapes our conception of reality and the world. Language affects our interactions with others and our capacity to feel empathy with other people, even beings vastly different from ourselves.

And in my interpretation of Arrival, film itself is a language, perhaps even the language. Film is the 'weapon,' shaping our conception of the world. And in two viewings of the movie, Denis Villeneuve just showed us how powerful it can be.