Vikram Johri: Cosmic emotions

The film Arrival, like the 2013 film Gravity, distils a personal tragedy through the operatic frames of space exploration. In Arrival, 12 giant pods land in different parts of the world and it is left to American linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to decode the oddly shaped written communication of the pods’ inhabitants. Are they here to harm or help us?

In Gravity, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) must contend with impending demise as her spaceship breaks down and she hurtles towards the earth in what looks like a very unsafe contraption. She survives in the end, making the film a cautionary tale about the dangers of looking beyond the earth for purposes, material or sublime.

While both the films are science fiction and reward connoisseurs of the genre, they are at heart deeply personal tales of motherhood and its pulls and pressures. Arrival’s Banks reaches out to aliens without batting an eyelid but memories of her dying daughter knock her out cold. Likewise, Stone from Gravity finds comfort only in the memories of her dead child.

Indeed, all successful science fiction plays essentially upon human drives and desires. But what Gravity and, to a far greater extent, Arrival do is corral those feelings into an explicitly human triumph. Especially in Arrival, the definition of human is taken beyond its bald scientific construct and bestowed the full force of its myriad meanings.

Until she is called upon to make contact with the aliens, Banks is perfectly content to lead her single life as a professor of linguistics at a university. She has helped the government earlier. When Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) seeks her out for the alien mission, they discuss the previous operation in which she had decoded the Farsi spoken by a group of rebels, who were subsequently  — based on her input — taken out by the American army. 

At the beginning of the film, this is Banks’ real currency: Her willingness to use her professional skills for work that nonchalantly elides the suffering of those who bear its consequences. As we learn later, this is an assumed pose. Banks seems genuinely happy at establishing contact with the aliens and is ecstatic after deciphering their language patterns, which — it would not be giving away too much to say — are nothing humanlike.

As she goes about trying to crack the case open, however, she is lashed by visions of her daughter. The scientist in her, eyes hunting for evidence, feels intimidated at the force with which these visions visit, and whose provenance she — and the viewer — will fully grasp only much later in the film. Nevertheless, Banks battles on, not giving up her search to find a fuller dictionary for what the Heptapods — the seven-legged aliens — convey. 

And just when the viewer fears the battle might get wearying, a breakthrough occurs. Banks must now solve a mystery far greater than the meaning enshrined in the Heptapods’ communication. The scientist in her has reached her limits. It is now for the instinctual, the visceral, the taste of a victory far more satisfying than scientific discovery to take over. 

Arrival takes a theme common in recent science fiction — apart from Gravity, Christopher Nolan’s Inception deals in the intermingling of the personal and the scientific — and truly, magically runs with it. While those films also situate their technical hijinks in an ultimately human setting, they attempt to answer questions that are far less fundamental than those Arrival takes on. 

If Gravity captured the depredations of unchecked space exploration, Arrival goes a notch higher and questions science itself. When members of other worlds visit us, Arrival gently warns us, it is not our scientific advancements that will protect us but our messy and ultimately indecipherable humanity that will help us reach out. That the film delivers this message amidst the highest scientific advancement humanity has seen makes a greater impact.

At the end of Arrival, we finally meet the real Banks. Was she the linguist who worked in the quiet of her office sharpening a skill set that made her a uniquely attractive member of any task force invested with important work? Or, was she simply — but not simplistically —just another woman who, apart from securing the world from imminent demise, made a personal choice that will be both life-affirming and tragic?

As the film ends, Banks cannot yet comprehend the full consequences of her actions, leaving open the possibility that perhaps she will come to experience regret. But that regret, Arrival assures us, is a talisman that Banks is prepared to live by, both for the reasons the film discloses and as support for its central thesis. Between speaking with aliens and shaping her future, Banks fronts a film in which science is the most easily solved of a web of enticing mysteries.

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