Arrival: The Sci-Fi Film That Rewires Its Own Grammar

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Most first-contact films are about the gap between us and them being crossed by force — a weapon, a virus, a signal, a war. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) proposes that the gap is crossed by grammar. Twelve enormous curved shells arrive and hang silently over twelve locations around the world, and the crisis the film dramatises is linguistic rather than military: how do you talk to a mind so unlike yours that even the shape of a sentence is foreign? It is the rare science-fiction blockbuster whose central action is a woman learning to read, and it is one of the smartest films the genre produced in its decade.

Amy Adams - vo.rs

Arrival: The Sci-Fi Film That Rewires Its Own Grammar