Arrival

Amy Adams delivers a sterling performance in this sci-fi masterpiece

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Directed By: Denis Villeneuve
Other Notable Films From Villeneuve: Enemy, Sicario, the Dune trilogy
Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forrest Whitaker
Screenplay By: Eric Heisserer¹
Movie Synopsis: A world-renowned linguist attempts to communicate with aliens who have visited Earth.
Signature Line: “Kangaroo.”

THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context

Here’s a thing I’ve found myself thinking about recently:

In Arrival, aliens (called “heptapods”) visit Earth in an attempt to communicate with humans. And though initial efforts are fruitless, the two sides eventually begin to understand each other, at which point a critical idea is expressed: While humans perceive time as a linear construct—as in: first one thing happens, then another thing, then another, etc.—the heptapods perceive it differently. They experience the past, present, and future simultaneously. They see it all at once, with each piece influencing the others.

And so what I’ve been thinking about is: Rewatching Arrival presents the audience with a unique experience. Because the first time you watch it, you experience it the way a human would. Because you have to. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen in the movie. Because you haven't seen it yet. And that's how things work.

After you’ve already seen it, though, you obviously know how it’s going to end. And because of that, all the earlier pieces take on a different shape, and a different tone, and a different trajectory. Which means: On rewatches, you experience Arrival the way a heptapod would. You feel the movie’s past, present, and future simultaneously. You see the whole thing, all at once, with each piece influencing the others.

Now, I can’t say for certain that this was one of Denis Villeneuve's intentions in constructing the movie the way he did. All I can say is:

There are aliens in Arrival, sure, but Arrival isn’t about aliens. It’s about the way that each of our experiences informs our existence. And it's about language. And it's about the importance of connection and communication.

Or something.

I don’t know.

Because none of us do.

Until we do.

THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Arrival

1:38: Amy Adams is here. She plays Dr. Louise Banks, a gifted linguist hired by the U.S. Army to help them communicate with a pair of aliens who’ve parked a spaceship in Montana. Adams is outstanding in this. I think it’s the finest performance of her career, and I’m very excited to be real mad later on when we talk about how she wasn’t even NOMINATED for an Oscar for it. What a total disaster. 

1:39: P.S. If aliens really did land on Earth, how long do you think it’d be before people started making fun of the situation on Twitter? I figure ten minutes, at most. They’d land, then there’d be nine minutes of people being shocked, and then by the tenth minute someone would post a selfie in a McDonald’s uniform with the ship in the background like, “Not me having to clock-in during an alien invasion 🫠 🫠 🫠 ” or something like that. 

1:40: P.P.S. Nothing makes me feel dumber than a movie successfully tricking me with a twist ending. You go back and rewatch it and it’s just like, “How the fuck did I miss all this?! There were so many signs!” Take here, for example. The movie opens with Louise saying the following: “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.” And as soon as she finishes saying that, it cuts to her with her baby, then it plays through a montage of scenes from the child’s life, ending with the child dying from a rare disease as a preteen. She LITERALLY TELLS US that her memories don’t work like normal memories, and then she shows us some memories, and I never even once considered the possibility that the memories were anything other than normal. 

1:41: P.P.P.S. There are a ton of circular moments in this movie (as in: things are connected to themselves in some sort of way). To wit, the first thing Louise says to her child in the montage is “Come back to me” (the baby starts crying when a nurse picks her up so Louise reaches for her and says it) and the last thing she says to her child is “Come back to me” (after her daughter has passed away). It’s always fun to catch those things on a rewatch.

4:02: As Louise is walking toward her classroom, we see a bunch of students in the background gathering around some TVs. They’re doing so because news stations are starting to report on the alien ships that have landed. A similar thing happened to Larami and me when we were in college. What happened was:

One afternoon, Larami was driving me to class. We were talking during the ride and then something on the radio caught my attention (this was back when people were still listening to the radio). I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. Hold on…” I turned the radio up and it was some guy talking about how there had been an attack somewhere. The details were sparse, but he sounded in a panic. I got to class and there were only a few people in there. After a few minutes, the professor walked in, said that class was cancelled, and then left. I walked to a nearby pool hall and finally saw what was going on: Two planes had been flown into two separate buildings in New York City. It was September 11, 2001. It happened while I was on my way to photography class. I think about that every time I rewatch Arrival.

6:18: Really great touch from Villeneuve here as Louise learns about the aliens via a news report on TV. A lot of filmmakers would’ve cut to the TV to show the report but Villeneuve opts to stay on Louise’s face the whole time so that all we see is her reacting to what she’s hearing. I’m not sure there's a more patient director working today than Villeneuve. He was the perfect person to make this movie.

9:36: There are only one of two ways to react to aliens visiting Earth: You’re either Amy Adams in Arrival, meaning you go to sleep perfectly fine that night, or you’re Joaquin Phoenix in Signs, meaning you start wearing a tin foil hat and stay up for days on end watching news reports on a small television you’ve set up in a closet. (I’m in the Joaquin Phoenix camp. I would be an absolute mess.) 

10:33: A really cool dichotomy that plays out in Arrival is: Every time we see Louise, she is totally calm and rational. But every time we get a glimpse of the outside world, everything has gone to shit (people are looting; others are panic-buying gas and water and food; some are spreading wild misinformation about how the government is in cahoots with the aliens). It’s crazy rewatching Arrival today because we basically saw all of those exact same things happen during the COVID-19 global shutdown. 

11:04: Forest Whitaker is here. He plays Colonel Weber, a high-ranking member of the Army who’s been tasked with finding someone who can figure out how to communicate with the aliens. I’m a Forest Whitaker guy. I don’t think he’s been bad ever one single time in a movie.  

11:05: P.S. The COOL MOVIES FOREST WHITAKER’S IN THAT AREN’T ARRIVAL podium:

• Honorable mention goes to Panic Room

• The bronze medal spot goes to Bloodsport

• The silver medal spot goes to Phone Booth

• The gold medal spot goes to The Color of Money

16:25: Jeremy Renner is here. He plays Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist who’s also being brought in on the alien mission. I don’t figure this was on purpose, but it’s interesting to me how similar this scene is to the one in Jurassic Park when Sam and Ellie are heading to visit the park for the first time. Both scenes (a) take place in helicopters (b) with protagonists who have no real idea what they’re walking into (c) and one of those protagonists is a very handsome, very intelligent theoretical scientist (d) and also the theoretical scientist is named Ian. 

18:31: Seeing this shot for the first time in the theater was an all-caps MOMENT. I’m so glad it was Denis Villeneuve who directed this movie. There’s nobody better at the WIDE SHOT + HAUNTING MUSIC thing.  

19:14: Here’s a question: Are helicopters the most important-feeling vehicles? I think they might be. Like, imagine you were chilling at home and some guy you’d never met before pulled up. If he did so in a helicopter (as opposed to a car, or a motorcycle, or even a private jet), you would immediately say to yourself, “Whoa. Whoever this guy is, he’s fucking important.”

22:01: Michael Stuhlbarg is here. He plays CIA Agent Halpern. I love Stuhlbarg. There's something simultaneously Extremely Unsettling and Very Comforting about him. He’s been great in a bunch of stuff, but my favorite thing he’s ever done was the scene at the beginning of Seven Psychopaths when he was arguing with Michael Pitt about people being shot in the eyes. I always laugh when Pitt tells him that he’s never shot anybody in the eyes but he did stab a guy in the ear once, to which Stuhlbarg responds, “Yeah, see, that’d be a different subject. That’d be Ears.”

23:34: I read a theory online about how the color orange in Arrival could be interpreted to represent Louise heading toward something good. For example:

• She wears an orange hazmat suit here as she goes to meet the aliens for the first time. 

• The door in her office where Colonel Weber first propositions her about joining the team is orange. 

• In the flashforward scene near the end of the movie where we see her talk with the guy who eventually gives her the piece of information she needs to save the mission, everything is lit completely in orange. 

• And if you scroll back up to that image of Ian showing up for the first time, you’ll notice some orange lights in the background behind him. 

I’m not sure that I’m all the way sold on the ORANGE EQUALS GOOD theory, but having it in your head is a fun way to rewatch the movie. 

25:43: These might be my favorite spaceships in any alien movie. I love how simple they are. They feel… like… actually real. I mentioned in the 28 Days Later essay how that movie handled a zombie invasion more realistically and more practically than any other zombie movie. I think the same thing applies to Arrival with alien invasions. Everything feels like it’s really happening.  

28:13: The group is officially headed inside the ship for the first time…

31:54: Oh, man. What a shot. We’re cooking now. Let’s do this scene for this week’s FOOTNOTES:

34:31: Louise’s first visit with the aliens didn’t really result in much; she just sort of stood there in awe. She’s listening right now to the audio recording of the aliens over and over again as she tries to figure out something—ANYTHING—that can help her on her next trip into the ship. The only time I’ve ever had this level of dedication to language was when Bone Thugs-N-Harmony put out “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” and I wanted to be the first one of my friends to learn the words. 

36:12: Louise improvises a new strategy. She takes a dry erase board into the ship and writes the word “HUMAN” on it. This is how I know I would’ve been the wrong person to send into that ship because I don’t think I would’ve been able to resist writing something dumb on the whiteboard. Like, I would’ve taken it out, scribbled something on it, held it up to the aliens, then the camera would’ve panned around to show that I’d written “DO YOU GUYS HAVE BUTTS?” on there. 

36:13: In response to Louise’s HUMAN message, the aliens write their own message on the glass wall that separates them. One of the coolest ideas in Arrival is that because the aliens experience time differently than we do, they don’t write things to represent sound, they write things to convey thought. So this one little circle you’re looking at is basically an entire conversation’s worth of information. (I wish I could write like that. The closest I’ve ever gotten is one time I wrote a single sentence that had, like, twelve commas in it, which prompted my editor to respond with a very simple, very curt, “Do not do this.”)

39:24: This is my favorite exchange of the whole movie. What’s happening is Weber is questioning Louise about her idea to communicate with the aliens via written correspondence rather than talking to them. When he says that he believes it’s gonna take longer to do it that way, she tells him that he’s wrong. He says that he’s gonna need more of an answer than that, at which point Louise folds her arms, thinks for a second, and then they have the following conversation: 

Louise: Kangaroo.
Weber: What is that?
Louise: In 1770, Captain James Cook’s ship ran aground off the coast of Australia, and he led a party into the country, and they met the Aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed at the animals that hop around and put their babies in their pouch, and he asked what they were, and the Aborigine said, “Kangaroo.”
Weber: And the point is?
Louise: It wasn’t ‘til later that they learned “kangaroo” means “I don’t understand.” So, I need this so that we don’t misinterpret things in there. Otherwise, this is gonna take ten times as long. 

It’s an incredible moment, made all the more enjoyable when Weber leaves and Louise reveals to Ian that she made the whole thing up. Lying >>>>>>>>>>>>>>

39:25: P.S. How about this incredible stat: Between Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker, and Jeremy Renner, there are a combined NINE (!!!) acting nominations from the Oscars. 

39:26: P.P.S. How about this stupid stat: Despite the fact that Arrival was nominated for eight Oscars, Adams somehow WASN’T EVEN FUCKING NOMINATED for Best Actress. I’m fine with her not winning (Arrival came out the same year as La La Land, and nobody was wrestling the trophy away from Emma Stone that year), but NOT EVEN GETTING NOMINATED is very goofy. You’re telling me that Amy Adams in Arrival wasn’t better than Isabelle Huppert in Elle? Or Ruth Negga in Loving? Or Natalie Portman in Jackie? Or Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins? Preposterous. Amy Adams in Arrival puts all those performances in a body bag. 

39:27: P.P.P.S. Of those nine cumulative Oscar nominations between the trio of actors, SIX of them belong to Adams. What a powerhouse.

44:00: I don’t believe this to be the case, but I do want to at least put forward a question here: On Louise’s third trip into the ship, she takes her hazmat suit off to more easily connect and/or communicate with the aliens. From there on, she never wears it again. And so I ask: Do you think Louise’s daughter eventually getting some very rare disease is somehow connected to Louise’s direct exposure to the aliens and their ship? 

48:51: Louise is able to get the aliens to write their names on the wall. Given that nobody can read the writing yet, Ian proposes that they call the aliens “Abbott” and “Costello.”² Proof yet again that I’d have been the wrong person to send into that ship, because if that were me, I can promise you one thing: It would’ve cut straight from Louise and me wondering what to call the aliens to a news story where some reporter is like, “Breaking news from the Montana alien site. We’re hearing now that the two aliens have names: Shaq and Kobe.”

48:52: P.S. When the twins were being born, I tried to talk Larami into letting me name one of them “Tim” and the other one “Duncan.” That's a real thing that happened. And I was 100 percent serious.  

51:56: Louise just had her first flashback/forward. Notice the color of the light on her when it happens? (ORANGE!)

53:47: During a montage sequence that covers a month or so in real time, Ian says the following while discussing possible theories for why the twelve alien ships decided to position themselves where they did: “The most plausible theory is that they chose places on Earth with the lowest incidents of lightning strikes…The next most plausible theory is that Sheena Easton had a hit song in each of those sites in 1980, so, we just don’t know.” I did a little digging around. The song he’s referencing is “Morning Train” from her debut album Take My Time.  

53:48: Some other big hits from 1980: Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin,” Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It,” and Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks.” 

57:58: Uh-oh. The first image of the heptapods got leaked to the outside world. People are freaking the fuck out. (They never say who it was who leaked the photo, but I think the implication is that it’s the one disgruntled soldier who we see watching an Info Wars-style podcast on his laptop between trips into the ship.) 

59:25: Louise’s second flashback/forward is the first all-caps CLUE that stuff is happening in a non-linear fashion. In this one, Louise’s daughter (Hannah) tells her about a project she’s been working on in class. (It’s a TV show called Mommy and Daddy Talk to Animals.) We get a quick glimpse of the artwork Hannah’s made for it, which is two people and a bird, just like when Louise and Ian go into the ship. Villeneuve was BEGGING us to catch this stuff. (If somebody tells you that they figured out early that these were flashforwards and not flashbacks, I want you to know you’re talking to a fucking liar.) 

1:01:15: Okay, two questions for you here:

1. Could you do it? Could you fall in love, get married, and have a kid if you knew ahead of time that the kid was gonna die? I don’t think I could do it. But to that point…

2. Is there a chance that, rather than Louise being a person who decided to have a child despite knowing it was going to end tragically, she was a person who was fated to the outcome? Like, it was going to happen regardless. There was no way around it. She was little more than a passenger on a train headed toward a bridge that’d already been blown in half. Could that be the case?

1:02:43: In 2013, Villeneuve directed a movie called Enemy that ended with a guy walking into a room and seeing that his wife had turned into a giant spider. Here’s a screenshot of the moment: 

It was a very disturbing, and very creepy, and very effective moment. He runs the play back again here with Louise and a heptapod during a dream sequence she’s having:

Several months ago, I was hanging out one night with Sean Fennessey (a movie expert of the highest order). We were talking about movie stuff, and he said some version of the phrase, “I like when movies talk to one another.” I’d never heard anybody express that idea before that moment, but as soon as he said it, I knew I was never gonna forget it. That's how I feel about this spider/heptapod thing. It feels like Enemy and Arrival are talking to each other.

1:04:22: Okay, shit is starting to go bad. Prior to this moment, all twelve of the nations that had received an alien spaceship landing had been talking with one another. Everybody’s splintering off now, though. China and Russia are mobilizing their forces, preparing for a potential war with the aliens. 

1:05:48: What do you think the aliens were doing during all this? Like, the humans can only be in the ship for a couple hours each day, which means the aliens are on their own most of the time. How are they keeping themselves occupied? What games do aliens play? Did they pack a Playstation 4 for the trip? 

1:05:49: P.S. I bet an alien who could see the future would be so fucking good at Rocket League. 

1:05:50: P.P.S. FUUUUUUUUCK Rocket League. That shit is the most frustrating experience of my life. 

1:06:57: The Americans are falling apart now, too. Louise asked the aliens why they came to Earth, to which they replied, “Offer weapon.” She’s trying to convince Weber and Agent Halpern that the aliens don’t fully understand what the word “weapon” means and that it’s very likely what they meant to say was “tool.” Nobody’s listening, though. The prevailing opinion among the higher-ups is that the alien ships are there to goad the humans into going to war against each other. 

1:09:10: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand there it is. Everybody has officially freaked the fuck out. All the nations have gone offline. Nobody’s talking to anybody.

1:10:14: The Info Wars soldier from earlier convinced a few of his buddies to help him put a bomb on the spaceship. For some reason, he thinks that blowing the aliens up is gonna help things. This guy fucking sucks. 

1:10:19: Gah. Louise and Ian (who have no idea there's a bomb on the ship now) are going back into the ship to try and get clarification on the “Offer weapon” phrase. Six weeks ago, Louise was a college professor and now she’s about to have a HEY, WHAT’D YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAID… conversation with a pair of aliens. Wild stretch for her.

1:13:45: The aliens are trying to save Louise and Ian. (Abbott keeps thumping the glass, trying to get them to turn around and see the bomb.) Question: Do the aliens know what’s about to happen? Like, since they experience time all at once, do they know Abbott is about to die in an explosion? Did they know this is how things were gonna go when they first showed up? Have they seen all of this already? If so, and if you were Abbott, would you still have signed up for the mission? (Time warp movies are always a lot of fun, but also they’re impossible to follow logically.) 

1:14:20: Louise has her hand up on the glass as she communicates with the aliens. This is the same face I make when I put my hand on the glass divider at Chipotle.

1:18:07: Okay. So, a bunch of shit has happened: 

• The bomb exploded: It caused enough damage to kill Abbott, but not enough damage to mess up the ship. (I like to picture Costello in the back screaming for Abbott like Trey did with Ricky when Ricky got shot in Boyz N The Hood.)

• The Info Wars guys and his buddies got into a shootout with a security detail as they approached the ship: NOTHING IS EVER MENTIONED ABOUT THIS AGAIN, LOL. There's no “Hey, Louise, so, ummm, that's our bad” from any of the people in charge. She wakes up from having been knocked out from the bomb and everybody just pretends like nothing happened.

• The ship rose half a mile up into the air to prevent any more humans from getting to it: A great line from Weber, who was wondering if the ship was gonna just flat-out leave: “Why does this feel worse?”

• And China has officially declared war on their ship: This is especially bad because China is the de facto leader, and so whatever they do, the other nations copy. 

1:20:58: Another flashback/forward. (ORANGE!) And it includes the following line from Louise to Hannah: “If you want science, call your father.” (The first time Louise and Ian meet, he briefly argues with her about how language isn’t the cornerstone of civilization, science is.) God, I love this movie. 

1:22:22: BANG! My boy Ian figured out that the aliens aren’t trying to goad all the humans into a war, they’re trying to get all the humans to work together. (Each of the twelve ships have been given a piece of a message and all twelve of the messages have to be snapped together for the complete message to be revealed.) 

1:25:21: The aliens sent a transport pod down so that Louise can come up to the big ship. Aliens have a way cooler Uber than humans.

1:26:57: Louise is in the chamber with Costello. Three things here:

1. Costello should’ve been a hooper instead of trying to communicate with people because he’s tall as hell.³ 

2. Where’s Costello’s face? Do you think it’s the area right above his legs that Louise has been talking to this whole time? And if that is his face, does that mean that all the area above that is his head? Or do you think his head is at the very top and she’s basically just been talking to his belly button the entire movie? 

3. When Louise first arrives into the chamber, she chokes and coughs a bit because of the mist. Could the mist be the cause of her eventual daughter’s illness? Or maybe a combination of the mist and the radiation? Or am I just overreacting about her taking her hazmat suit off because I won’t even wear a swimsuit without a pair of underwear on also? 

1:29:57: Louise and Costello are talking. She needs him to send a message to the other spaceships because everybody’s comms are offline. First of all, it’s crazy that the humans killed Abbott, like, ten minutes ago and now she’s in there asking Costello for a favor. Second of all, as they talk, Costello says this:

That's the same thing I say to Larami when she wears a dress that makes her butt look nice. 

1:31:37: I’ve been making a bunch of jokes throughout this rewatch because making jokes is my favorite thing to do, but let me just say right here without any other distractions or motives or whatever: This movie fucking rules. It’s legitimately perfect. One of the best ever. And this whole sequence with Louise and Costello talking… I mean, we’re talking about an all-time Sci-Fi Movie Pantheon Moment. They answer nearly every single question that you’ve had while watching Arrival, and they do so in a way that feels like it makes total sense. 

• Why are the aliens on Earth? They’re gonna help the humans right now because in 3,000 years the aliens are gonna need help from the humans. (I love that this is all the information we get. It’s a perfect example of how Villeneuve seems to always know juuuuuust the right amount of information to give.) 

• How do they know what’s gonna happen in 3,000 years? Because they see and experience all of time all at once. (THAT’S WHY THEY WRITE IN CIRCLES!)

• What’s the weapon they’ve been talking about? It’s not a weapon, it’s a tool, and it’s their language. If humans can fully learn the alien language, they’ll also be able to experience all of time at once. (LANGUAGE DETERMINES PERCEPTION!)

• What’s up with the flashbacks? They’re not flashbacks. They’re flashforwards. Louise has been experiencing them as she learns the alien language. Louise and Ian get married, have a child, she tells Ian that she knows the child is gonna die because she can see the future, and so he left Louise because he just couldn’t forgive her for not telling him about everything beforehand.

Again: It’s a truly beautiful moment in a truly beautiful movie. I’ve seen Arrival a solid 15 times these past nine years, and this scene here (and the whole movie, really) is still so incredibly effective.

1:31:38: P.S. The only question they don’t ever get around to answering: “DO YOU GUYS HAVE BUTTS?” (…Aaaaaaaaaaaaand we’re back to the jokes.)

1:35:50: The ships have all turned wide oblong now rather than tall oblong. They’re getting ready to head on home.

1:39:25: The final handful of minutes of this movie are crazy. Being that Louise is able to access the future, she uses it to: (a) fully learn the alien language; (b) write a book about the language; (c) see into the future, where she meets General Shang (the guy who runs the Chinese military) at a celebration party; (d) get him to give her his phone number; (e) and have him say his wife’s dying words to her (“In war, there are no winners, only widows”). She then uses all of that information in the present to call Shang on a satellite phone and convince him not to go to war with the aliens. 

1:41:12: If things all work out the way that I’m hoping they do, my dying words are gonna play out as such:

[the year 2071]
[I’m lying in a hospital bed, slowly approaching death]
[I motion for Larami to come closer so I can say my final words]
[I place my hand into hers]
[She leans in]
[I gather up all my strength to speak]
[I weakly whisper into her ear]

You almost had me? …You never had me. …You never had your car.

[The EKG machine flatlines]
[I die]

1:44:19: BANG. GENERAL SHANG CALLED OFF HIS WAR AFTER LOUISE SAID HIS WIFE’S DYING WORDS TO HIM. LOUISE DID IT. SHE SAVED EVERYONE.

1:44:20: P.S. I wonder how much she got paid for this book deal? It had to have been several million bucks, at the very least. I gotta stop fucking around with books on rap and movies and basketball. I need one of them I TALKED TO ALIENS book checks. It’s the only way I’m gonna be able to afford a helicopter. 

1:46:13: Louise, in voiceover, talking to her unborn daughter: “So, Hannah, this is where your story begins. The day they departed. Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it. And I welcome every moment of it.” 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 

1:48:57: Ian, talking to Louise: “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.” 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

1:49:40: Louise, talking to Ian, knowing they’re gonna have a child together and he’s gonna leave her after she tells him she knew their child was gonna die early: “I forgot how good it felt to be held by you.” 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

1:50:33: The movie’s over. Good movie. 

UNEXPECTED SIMILARITIES
Things that last week’s movie (Predator) has in common with this week’s movie 

• Both movies have scenes where the protagonists take a ride in a helicopter. 

• Both movies have scenes where at least one alien visits Earth.

• Both movies have scenes where a white person talks to an alien. 

• Both movies have scenes where an alien dies in an explosion.

• Both movies have scenes where someone in charge withholds information about something. 

• Both movies have scenes where soldiers shoot assault rifles. 

THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching Arrival

• What language is Sanskrit? Louise mentions this language to Weber when he first asks her about coming to work on the alien project. Per Google, it’s “an ancient Indo-Aryan language and is recognized as a classical language of India.”

• Are you SURE Amy Adams wasn’t nominated for Arrival? Yes.

• Rolling Stone best sci-fi movies list? Rolling Stone put together a list of the 150 greatest sci-fi movies ever made last year. I remembered reading the list last year but couldn’t quite remember where Arrival was on there. That's why I Googled this. They had it as the 14th greatest ever. 

• What’s Jeremy Renner up to these days? He apparently has a book that came out a couple months ago called My Next Breath. It’s a memoir. I ordered it. I hope he talks about Arrival in it. 

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Next week’s movie: Scream

You can stream Scream on HBO Max or rent it wherever you rent movies from. 

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​​This essay was edited by Shelly Romero. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.

1. Adapted from a short story titled Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang.

2. I assume this is a little glance at how the most famous bit that Abbott and Costello ever did (“Who’s on First?”) was all about them miscommunicating with one another, which is one of the main themes of the movie.

3. This is a joke that only the most online people will get.