A film whose intentions are to be an Interstellar of the mind that, while it raises an interesting set of ideas, is mostly a derivative imitation based in an anachronistic militaristic ideology that undermines its message.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In its slow pacing this film tries to construct in its viewer a new form of alien consciousness that comes, we understand eventually, from the learning of a new form of seemingly more primitive, but actually far more advanced language. This is a more emotionally-based language, one that is more sophisticated, expressive, complex and truly communicative, one that derives, we learn, from a new form of cosmic temporal awareness. In a section of the film where it seems almost embarrassed about making its point, we are told that the arriving aliens must remain on earth for 3000-years and so need the help of humanity for that time during which the consciousness introduced by the alien's language will begin to permeate human culture, deconstructing alienating boundaries and constituting a new form of collective simultaneity that cuts across time and space. Learning the new alien language reconfigures one's perception of time so that events in the future blend with those from the past in a new form of totally aware present. It is an awareness, we are told, that breeds a new form of empathy amongst the disparate groups of conflicting humanity on planet earth that arises from out of the temporal knowledge of all that will come to pass in the future that reconditions expectations in the present that leads to an openness, less reactionary disposition.

This is an interesting concept worth considering on the merits of its Buddhistic truth. Interstellar created a film whose events and the objective-scientific rational reality of worm-hole travel and black-hole physics of relativity and temporal compression became mirrored in an emotional sensitivity to the kinds of isolations, distances and divisions such physical processes might introduce into the lives of those subjected to them. That film culminated in a mixture of uncertainty coming from following the emotion of love and the operation of the quantum flux of the tesseract, entering into which took the same sort of leap of faith and emotional logic to navigate its infinitely complex structure in the same way that love for another cuts-through the infinity of rationalizations that over-determine our interactions with others and the external world. The Arrival, on the other hand, attempts basically the same but with a process of alien language-learning, at the level of the individual-collective psyche rather than the collective assemblage of humanity spread across the cosmos: real divisions and militaristic stances between nation-states and cultures that become amplified as a result of suspicions surrounding the asymmetric learning and sharing of information from the aliens are later intertwined into a collective awareness of togetherness and solidarity as One Humanity aware of the whole of its eventual temporal unfolding in the face of 3000-years of symbiotic cohabitation with the arriving alien hepto-pod species begins to emerge from out of the central character of Amy Adams's Louise Banks. So, on the one hand, the cosmic spread of humanity and the intertwined affect that blends and transforms space and time through the real-world physical-scientific processes upon which they are based and, on the other hand, the objective fact of language inserting itself into the consciousness of one that transforms the whole through a process of an awakening of empathy for the Other in the certain knowledge of one's inextricable entanglement with everyone and everything else.

The reality of The Arrival, however, is that while it clearly adapts this interesting concept from Interstellar and modifies it to make a new, equally interesting point about possible strange and unknowable futures of humanity we can already begin to think by taking what we already know seriously, its potential is here quite generously reconstructed. The truth is that the film is quite a hollow, formulaic attempt: from the use of slow, nearly a-vocal 'narrative', to the cross-cutting of documentary-like scenes from the past, The Arrival tries to capture both the New American Cinema of Deliberation while also simultaneously appropriating the technique of intermixing time and place in Interstellar through the use of documentary aesthetics. In this sense, The Arrival tries to build (by simple appropriation) on the type of cinema in more recent films like Blue Valentine, Drive, The Place Beyond the Pines, Joy, Silver Linings Playbook—films with Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, or Ryan Gosling, for example—that are attempts to be something other than loud, obnoxious American films that always know everything all the time, that elaborate another form of socio-cultural identity for an American cinema culture in need of renewal. In the end though, while it is certainly possible to intuit the intentions of the film that derives from the application of these two approaches, they hang together in an overly loose, somewhat misappropriated fashion that has the effect of producing more a desire for the film that could have or should have been made in its place and that one day hopefully will. In short, while those who produced this film clearly recognized valuable elements taking place within contemporary American cinema, the film barely rises above a simple imitation of these elements.

Despite this critique, the film does give something to reflect on with regard to the kind of culture that always imagines encounters with alien cultures that take place not through accountable, legitimate democratic social structures, but, rather, through the on-the-edge-of-hostililty mindlessness of the military, against which legitimate democratic forces provide merely a naive temporary obstruction. It is in this way that The Arrival betrays its own core intention by basing its message of human empathy and compassion in the idiocy of the military and an absurdly simplistic-to-the-point-of-problematic conception of inter-national relationships that are here imagined as little more than the predominant caricatures of Russia and China as bad actors and aggressors with the United States and other Western allies as thoughtful, sharing, open peoples whose behavior always leads humanity towards a brighter future (just like the sham of a film Independence Day 2 does to a nauseating degree). Today, with the Macarthyitism of the American Democratic Party, the erosion of legitimacy of Western democratic structures, the primacy of the economic and police apparatuses, to still make a film that exalts this antiquated and seriously anachronistic conception of Western Democracy, to make a film that still sees in the military a beligerant-yet-helpful ally who only needs succinct and common-sense engagement to redirect its potential for destruction to good aims (what a series like Homeland or the entire network Showtime seems entirely designed to accomplish) is either woefully naive or intentionally misleading. In either case, it is certainly a sad commentary on where this film thinks American culture stands today: either purely delusional or systematically fraudulent. One is left with the hope that another, more decent expression of humanity's encounter with alien life can be one day created that will, rather, reflect our societies' actual reach for ethical, moral, cultural and social improvement by being located, first, in those who espouse such a view, rather than subservient to and mediated through the true authority of aggression. Such a film would, rather, undermine the current authoritarian ideology rather than support it through the toxic fiction that it has the legitimacy to one day mediate the most significant encounter in human history.