Contact? Contact!

I'm a little conflicted about Arrival (2016). It's strong science fiction, beautifully filmed (with an excellent score), but also left me a bit cold from the story perspective. Which was the same way I felt about Contact, come to think of it.

Amy Adams is a linguistics professor who gets called up by Col. Forrest Whittaker when the aliens arrive. Their ships are gigantic matte black pebbles, hovering on end 20 or so feet above Montana, among other places. On the team with Adams is mathematical physicist Jeremy "Lumpy" Renner. Sadly, he is pretty much absent in this movie - I wouldn't have minded at least a little bit of the old "math is the universal language" stuff.

The aliens are called heptapods - seven-legged cthuloid walking squid. They live in a smokey vapor environment and communicate with low groans and rumbles. Adams never figures that out, but their written language, which looks like the ring a coffee cup leaves on a napkin, is more amenable to analysis.

The analysis is all scientificy and the movie doesn't really get into it. We seem to pick it up very fast. But understanding is hampered by the difference in the aliens' perception of reality - and vice versa. Yes, this is a movie about the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, that the structure of your language determines what you can think about. Perhaps, as she learns their language, she is absorbing their world view, and maybe even ...

There is another thread that runs through the movie, about Amy Adams daughter, from her birth to her early tragic death. I took it for a flashback at first, but that doesn't match some of the things she says. I guess I'll leave out the spoiler, except to say that the "twist" made Adams seem like a bit of a monster to me. Kind of like in Passengers (different circumstance, but similar stakes).

So, I wasn't all that thrilled by the plot, Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis included. But I loved the movie in general. It is beautifully photographed, full of big landscapes back-lit by a low sun, the air hazy with light. The score by Johann Johannson is also great, full of deep, droning ostinatos. It mirrors that spoken language of the heptapods, which has more than a touch of whale song.

So, even if the plot didn't do it for me (and Renner was wasted), we liked this movie a lot. Feast for the eyes and ears, but maybe not as much for the brain as expected.