Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, Mark O’Brien
OUR RATING: ★★★★☆
Story: Sci-fi drama directed by Denis Villeneuve. Arrival (2016) follows an elite team, language expert Louise Banks (Amy Adams), mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), and US Army soldier Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), put together to investigate when multiple mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe. Humankind teeters on the verge of global war as everyone scrambles for answers, and to find them, Banks, Donnelly and Weber will take a chance that could threaten their lives, and quite possibly humanity.
Where to Watch:
'Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it, and I welcome every moment of it.' - Dr. Louise Banks (Arrival) Share on X
Dr. Louise Banks: [giving birth to her daughter] I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Memory is a strange thing. It doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order.
Dr. Louise Banks: [raising her daughter] I remember moments in the middle.
Dr. Louise Banks: [after being told grave news about her adolescent daughter] And this was the end. Come back to me. You come back to me.
Dr. Louise Banks: [after her daughter’s death] But now I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings.
Dr. Louise Banks: There are days that define your story beyond your life. Like the day they arrived.
Colonel Weber: [to Louise] I have something I need you to translate for me.
Man’s Voice: [on the recording, to the aliens] Why are you here? Can you understand us? Where did you come from?
Dr. Louise Banks: [after listening to the alien recording] How many speaking?
Colonel Weber: Two. Assume they were not speaking at the same time.
Dr. Louise Banks: Are you sure? Did they have mouths?
Colonel Weber: How would you approach translating this? Do you hear any words? Phrases?
Dr. Louise Banks: I don’t know.
Colonel Weber: So what can you tell me?
Dr. Louise Banks: I can tell you that it’s impossible to translate from an audio file. I would need to be there to interact with them.
Colonel Weber: You didn’t need that with the Farsi translations.
Dr. Louise Banks: I didn’t need it because I already knew the language.
Dr. Louise Banks: Colonel? You mentioned Berkeley. Are you going to ask Danvers next?
Colonel Weber: Maybe.
Dr. Louise Banks: Before you commit to him, ask him the Sanskrit word for war and its translation.
'Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.' - Ian Donnelly (Arrival) Share on X
Dr. Louise Banks: That’s quite a greeting.
Ian Donnelly: Yeah, well, you wrote it.
Dr. Louise Banks: Yeah. It’s the kind of thing you write as a preface. Dazzle them with the basics.
Ian Donnelly: Yeah, it’s great. Even if it’s wrong.
Ian Donnelly: [to Louise] Well, the cornerstone of civilization isn’t language, it’s science.
Colonel Weber: Ian is a theoretical physicist from Los Alamos. You’ll be reporting to me, but you’ll be working with him when you’re in the shell.
Ian Donnelly: That’s what they’re calling the UFO.
Colonel Weber: Priority one, what do they want, and where are they from?
Ian Donnelly: And beyond that, how did they get here? Are they capable of faster-than-light travel? We prepared a list of questions to, you know, go over, starting with a series of just a handshake binary sequences…
Dr. Louise Banks: How about we just talk to them before we start throwing math problems at them?
Colonel Weber: This is why you’re both here.
Ian Donnelly: I’ll bring the coffee. Coffee with some aliens.
Dr. Kettler: Not everyone is able to process experiences like this.
'Memory is a strange thing. We are so bound by time, by its order.' - Dr. Louise Banks (Arrival) Share on X
Ian Donnelly: Have they responded to anything? Shapes, patterns, numbers, Fibonacci?
Colonel Weber: We can’t tell what they’re saying when they respond to “hello”, so don’t get ahead of yourself.
Dr. Louise Banks: What have you figured out?
Colonel Weber: We’re just getting started.
Dr. Louise Banks: So is there any physical contact with the, um, am I the only one having trouble saying aliens?
Dr. Louise Banks: [inside the alien spacecraft] So what happens now?
Colonel Weber: [as two aliens appear behind the glass] They arrive. Dr. Banks. Dr. Banks, you can start.
Dr. Louise Banks: [to the aliens] I’m human. What are you? Human.
Dr. Louise Banks: So first, we need to make sure that they understand what a question is. Okay, the nature of a request for information along with a response. Then, we need to clarify the difference between a specific “you” and a collective “you”, because we don’t want to know why Joe Alien is here, we want to know why they all landed.
'Purpose requires an understanding of intent.' - Dr. Louise Banks (Arrival) Share on X
Dr. Louise Banks: We need to find out, do they make conscious choices? Or is their motivation so instinctive that they don’t understand a “why” question at all? And, and biggest of all, we need to have enough vocabulary with them that we understand their answer.
Dr. Louise Banks: They need to see me.
Captain Marks: She’s taking off her hazmat suit. D. Banks! Is it okay?
Colonel Weber: You’re risking contamination.
Dr. Louise Banks: They need to see me.
Ian Donnelly: [takes his hazmat suit and helmet off] Screw it! Everybody dies, right?
Dr. Louise Banks: [as the aliens emit circular symbols onto the screen in response] I think those are their names. They have names.
Ian Donnelly: So what are we going to call them?
Dr. Louise Banks: I don’t know.
Ian Donnelly: I was thinking Abbott and Costello.
Ian Donnelly: Here are some of the many things we don’t know about heptapods. Greek. Hepta, “Seven”. Pod, “Foot”. Seven feet. Heptapod. Who are they? Trying to answer this in any meaningful way is hampered by the fact that, outside being able to see them and hear them, the heptapods leave absolutely no footprint. The chemical composition of their spaceship is unknown. The shell emits no waste, no gas, no radiation. Assuming that the shells communicate with each other, they do so without detection. The air between the shells is untroubled by sonic emission or light wave.
Ian Donnelly: Are they scientists? Or tourists? If they’re scientists, they don’t seem to ask a lot of questions.
Ian Donnelly: Why did they park where they did? The world’s most decorated experts can’t crack that one. The most plausible theory is that they chose places on Earth with the lowest incidence of lightning strikes. But there are exceptions. The next most plausible theory is that Sheena Easton had a hit song at each of these sites in 1980. So, we just don’t know.
Ian Donnelly: How do they communicate? Here, Louise is putting us all to shame. The first breakthrough was to discover that there’s no correlation between what a heptapod says and what a heptapod writes.
Ian Donnelly: Unlike all written human languages, their writing is semasiographic. It conveys meaning. It doesn’t represent sound. Perhaps they view our form of writing as a wasted opportunity, passing up a second communications channel.
Ian Donnelly: We have our friends in Pakistan to thank for their study of how heptapods write, because unlike speech, a logogram is free of time. Like their ship or their bodies, their written language has no forward or backward direction. Linguists call this non-linear orthography, which raises the question, “Is this how they think?”
Ian Donnelly: Imagine you wanted to write a sentence using two hands, starting from either side. You would have to know each word you wanted to use, as well as how much space they would occupy. A heptapod can write a complex sentence in two seconds, effortlessly. It’s taken us a month to make the simplest reply. Next, expanding vocabulary. Louise thinks it could easily take another month to be ready for that.
Ian Donnelly: You know, I was just thinking about you. You approach language like a mathematician. You know that, right?
Dr. Louise Banks: I will take that as a compliment.
Ian Donnelly: Yeah, well, it is. As I watch you steer us around these communication traps that I didn’t even know existed, it’s like, “What?” I guess that’s why I’m single.
'You can understand communication and still end up single.' - Dr. Louise Banks (Arrival) Share on X
Dr. Louise Banks: I feel like everything that happens in there comes down to the two of us.
Ian Donnelly: Yeah, that’s a good thing though, right? You and I? Have you seen the jokers that we’re working with? Thank God I got you!
Ian Donnelly: I’m curious, are you dreaming in their language?
Dr. Louise Banks: I may have had a few dreams, but I don’t think that that makes me unfit to do this job.
Dr. Louise Banks: Well, let’s say that I taught them chess instead of English. Every conversation would be a game. Every idea expressed through opposition, victory, defeat. You see the problem? If all I ever gave you was a hammer…
Colonel Weber: Everything’s a nail.
Colonel Weber: [referring to the symbols the aliens have written] What does it say?
Dr. Louise Banks: Offer weapon.
Dr. Louise Banks: We don’t know if they understand the difference between a weapon and a tool. Our language, like our culture, is messy, and sometimes, one can be both.
Ian Donnelly: And it’s quite possible that they’re asking us to offer them something, not the other way around. It’s like the first part of a trade.
Agent Halpern: We must consider the idea that our visitors are prodding us to fight among ourselves until only one faction prevails.
Agent Halpern: We’re a world with no single leader. It’s impossible to deal with just one of us, and with the word “weapon” now.
Colonel Weber: What happened in there was an attack. We can hope for the best, but I have orders to prepare for a retaliation. We may have to evacuate.
Dr. Louise Banks: No, that’s the wrong move. As long as they stay, we have to stay.
Dr. Louise Banks: [as the spacecraft rises a few inches] Well, they’re not leaving.
Colonel Weber: Why does this feel worse?
Dr. Louise Banks: You cracked something, didn’t you?
Ian Donnelly: [referring to the screen] Yeah. Come here. Take a look at this section. It seems to be talking about time. Their symbol for time is everywhere. So what is this? A formula for faster-than-light travel? Who can tell? There are too many gaps. Nothing’s complete. Then it dawned on me. Come here. Right here. Stop focusing on the ones, look at the zeroes. How much of this is data? How much of it is negative space? So I measured it. 0.0833 recurring. Perhaps you’d like that as a fraction. One of twelve.
Dr. Louise Banks: We need to talk to the other sites, we need to help them with what they’ve gotten from the heptapods.
Agent Halpern: In case you don’t remember, we’re blacked out. China just threatened to destroy their shell. We’re on our own.
Dr. Louise Banks: But this says that all of the pieces fit together.
Agent Halpern: And I’m telling you that no one else cares.
Woman’s Voice: [after listening to a message from Russia] In their final session, the aliens said, “There is no time. Many become one.” I fear we have all been given weapons.
Dr. Louise Banks: “Many become one,” could just be their way of saying, “Some assembly required.”
Agent Halpern: Why hand it out to us in pieces? Why not just give it all over?
Dr. Louise Banks: Well what better way to force us to work together for once?
Ian Donnelly: Look, they’re not our enemy. They’ve made no act of aggression towards us.
Agent Halpern: Maybe this is their way of being aggressive.
Colonel Weber: That’s not the question.
Agent Halpern: Well what is the question?
Colonel Weber: How do we get you back in that room when it’s half a mile straight up?
Agent Halpern: I think our work here is done. It’s in the hands of our superiors now.
Dr. Louise Banks: [to the aliens] I’m sorry. We’re sorry. I need you to, I need you to send a message to the other sites. I don’t, I don’t understand. What is your purpose here? How can you know the future? I don’t, I don’t understand. Who is this child?
Dr. Louise Banks: [has flashforward of being with her daughter] Well, believe it or not, I know something that’s going to happen. I can’t explain how I know, I just do, and when I told your daddy, he got really mad. And he said I made the wrong choice.
8-Year-Old-Hannah: What? What’s going to happen?
Dr. Louise Banks: It has to do with a really rare disease, and it’s unstoppable. Kind of like you are, with your swimming, and your poetry, and all the other amazing things that you share with the world.
8-Year-Old-Hannah: I am unstoppable?
Dr. Louise Banks: Yeah.
Dr. Louise Banks: [after she has a flashforward of her daughter] I just realized why my husband left me. My husband left me.
Ian Donnelly: You were married?
12-Year-Old-Hannah: Why is my name Hannah?
Dr. Louise Banks: Well, your name is very special because it is a palindrome. It reads the same forward and backward.
Dr. Louise Banks: [referring to the alien’s language] I can read it. I know what it is.
Ian Donnelly: What?
Dr. Louise Banks: It’s not a weapon, it’s a gift.
Dr. Louise Banks: The weapon is their language. They gave it to us. Do you know what that means?
Colonel Weber: So we can learn Heptapod, if we survive.
Dr. Louise Banks: If you learn it, when you really learn it, you begin to perceive time the way that they do, so you can see what’s to come. But time, it isn’t the same for them. It’s non-linear.
Dr. Louise Banks: So, Hannah. This is where your story begins, the day they departed.
'If you could see your whole life from the start to finish, would you change things?' - Dr. Louise Banks (Arrival) Share on X
Ian Donnelly: You know, I’ve had my head tilted up to the stars for as long as I can remember. You know what surprised me the most? It wasn’t meeting them. It was meeting you.
Dr. Louise Banks: [as she embraces him] I forgot how good it felt to be held by you.
Ian Donnelly: [in a flashforward we see Louise and Donnelly in a relationship, living together] You want to make a baby?
Dr. Louise Banks: Yes. Yeah.
Hello, can someone help me to remember the quote where Dr. Banks says, “You are beautiful, you leave beautifulness everywhere you go…” something like that… please =/
I’m trying to recollect something Amy said towards the end of the movie, something like: Even as we know the end, we enter the journey. Who can help?
“If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things?”
🙂
“Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment.”
THANK YOU BOTH! I was about to go to theaters and watch the movie again just to find these quotes! I might still go and watch it again haha. Thanks again!
To call this a good movie is like calling “Trump” a smooth and polished politician. For some one like me who eat drink and breath Sci-Fi, this is a mediocre at best movie which you can watch on TV in a month.
To not understand ‘Arrival’ and call yourself a sci-fi person is like scratching the dirt with sticks and consider yourself a Picasso. Sorry, bud.