9/17/2023 0 Comments Arrival linguist![]() ![]() That is fairly well supported by evidence. The strong theory is that language determines the range of cognition, which has now been shown to be untrue the weak theory argues that language has an influence on how people think, but stops short of complete determinism. This comes in two flavours: strong and weak. But the main point of the film is with the effect of the alien language itself on human cognition – the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. These are not little-green men but something far more uncanny, their half-glimpsed, octopus-cum-spindle-fingered-hand appearance recalling the eldritch extraterrestrials of Lovecraft and his imitators, while still being distinctively different and memorably odd. The strangeness of the aliens, their fundamental otherness and the human struggle to cope with encountering that are all very well conveyed. It’s an internal, claustrophobic film, full of extreme close-ups and very shallow depth-of-field. Arrival, it turns out, isn’t really a film about translation at all, so much as the effect that contact with the alien has on the human mind. ![]() This is where I’m going to move into slightly more spoilerish territory, so feel free to stop here. As I’ve said, once the decipherment is accomplished, the film picks up a great deal, and seems a lot surer of its footing. The fact that it’s essentially being done by a single (apparently fairly junior) linguist and a physicist (who at no point does any actual physics) rather than a huge international team of the world’s best and brightest can perhaps be forgiven, as can the incredibly rapid pace of decipherment but their method – essentially holding up a whiteboard with words written on it and pointing at things – would struggle even with the cultural and conceptual differences on earth, let alone with something fundamentally alien.īut that’s enough on the negative. I don’t really want this review to be an exercise in nitpicking, but the whole method of understanding and translating the alien language doesn’t really make a lot of sense. ![]() Which brings me to the translation itself. Ironically, this stumble over the ambiguity inherent in the word ‘linguist’ is exactly the kind of thing Banks is so keen to avoid in her interactions with the aliens. The film even seems a bit fuzzy on what exactly a linguist is – it’s never clear what exactly protagonist Dr Louise Banks’ specialism is, and the film seems to waver between envisaging her as a linguist in the sense of someone who studies linguistics and works on the structures of languages, and a linguist in the sense of someone who knows and translates foreign languages (everything from Mandarin to Farsi) for a living. Portuguese began in the Middle Ages, when language was considered an art-form…’ Maybe it’s different in America, but my linguistics education was mainly carried out in small rooms with small groups, lecturers going through the fine detail of morphology or phonology without much in the way of purple prose or rhetorical flourish. Linguistics lecturers speak to vast lecture-halls, beginning a day’s class with things like ‘Today we’re going to learn about Portuguese, and why it’s so different from other Romance languages. Going back to what I said in my essay on science fiction and archaeology, it feels very much like a scientist’s imagining of what arts and humanities research is like, rather than something fully grounded in research. ![]() The first half, by contrast – the half mostly concerned with the translation of the alien language – feels baggy, a little slow, and the linguistic elements don’t quite ring true. The second is clever, satisfying and affecting, upending expectations and tying things up in a neat bow characteristic of the best short stories. It’s difficult to go into specifics without spoiling things, but suffice it to say that Arrival is a film of two halves. However, despite the marketing, the linguistics content (of which there is certainly plenty) is unfortunately not its strongest aspect, or, ultimately, the one it’s most interested in. I’d whole-heartedly encourage people – including linguists – to see it, if for no other reason than that it’s the kind of film I’d like to see a lot more of. I’m not going to try and be contrarian and say it’s anything other than a very well-made, interesting and thought-provoking science fiction movie. I’ll just put that out there right at the start. So in the end, how did it stack up? Was it the masterpiece several reviewers have hailed it as, or was my friends’ caution justified? The answer, it turns out, is somewhere in between.Īrrival is a good film. That said, some of my linguist friends were wary, fearful of how Hollywood would treat their discipline, despite the generally favourable reviews of Arrival’s linguistic content. ![]()
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