Understanding “Arrival”

Still trying to figure out “Arrival?” These might help:

In the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan explains more about what a linguist does, with some comments from the woman who helped to inspire the character played by Amy Adams, Jessica Coon.

Linguists, Coons explains, aren’t so much glorified translators as they are theoreticians, more interested in the why of humankind’s natural affinity for language acquisition, when other species aren’t hard-wired for it.

In Entertainment Weekly, Darren Franich is one of the few people writing about the film to dismiss its aspirations of profundity.

There’s a phony core to Arrival, though, which emerges gradually and then suddenly. The film opens with the birth, life, and death of Banks’ daughter. The devastation of her loss haunts the film; mother-daughter scenes play through the movie. It seems like a character note, a clever bit of arc-setting: Banks, grieving the loss of her child, must now midwife our communication with an entirely new species. Perhaps you would say: Having cut herself off from humanity, she must now connect humanity to the stars. Or maybe not everything is plot-essential; maybe this is a movie daring enough to suggest that the characters have a life outside of the constraints of the movie.

But Arrival, turns out, is entirely a Plot Movie. Every character trait and hanging line of dialogue is hermetically sealed into the architecture of what amounts to a Big Twist. As Banks learns the aliens’ language, her consciousness comes unstuck in time. The daughter we’ve been seeing hasn’t even been born yet.