I love science fiction. I like to
read science fiction. I like to watch science fiction. I especially like it
when in a science fiction novel/movie something weird is happening and they try
to explain it using our actual understanding of the universe and how this odd
thing may occur under certain circumstances For example, perception of time
changes the faster you go; so if you travel through space at a high velocity
you will experience time much slower than the people on Earth and when you get
back to earth the people you left will either be old or dying while you may
have experience maybe a year or two. Knowledge such as this can be used to make
some fun science fiction.
Knowing this about me you can
probably understand how disappointed I was with the Arrival movie that came out
in 2016. There will be spoilers below the image. Up here is safe for those who don’t
want to see spoilers. I am still going to warn you that this movie was
horrible. It was a fictional drama that tried to be a science fiction movie and
failed. It was definitely more fiction than science fiction and for that reason
I was horrible disappointed. Now, to get to business.
In case it wasn’t clear above, this
is where the spoilers begin.
So when the main character in the
movie is called in to learn the alien language this is obviously an important
step in order to communicate with them. They have this strange circular written
language. Their speech sounds similar to whales and since we don’t live in
their atmosphere and probably can’t hear the same decibels as they can it makes
sense that maybe we wouldn’t be able to hear their speech the way it was meant
to. This is why she wants to learn the written language and try to teach them
ours with some vocal cues to hopefully make it faster.
Ok, so far so good. Unfortunately,
this is pretty much as far as it goes on the whole making any sense of it. From
our perspective she just randomly understands their written language and no one
else does even though there is a whole team working with her. Well maybe she is
smarter than everyone else so we will stop with that. On the other hand, her
learning and understanding the language somehow rewires her brain so that she
no longer experiences time linearly. Huh!
The whole learning a language can
rewire your brain comes from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. They definitely
used some artistic liberty with this hypothesis. This hypothesis states that
structure of a language can influence your thought process and perhaps your behavior
in the culture that speaks the language. This is because not every language has
the same structure and you have to change the way you think and the order you
state things to form proper sentences. This makes sense. What doesn’t make
sense is that her brain got rewired on a whole new level. She was somehow able
to experience her child’s birth and death before it even happened.
We perceive time is a specific manner because we interact
with the environment in a linear way. We receive signals from our environment
and then process them and react. Our brains therefore can only perceive things
in a linear manner. There is no way you can rewire our neurons to function in
any other order than input and output. Time can slow down or speed up based on
our perception. For example, when we are scared it can appear that time slows
down and that we can figure out a way to escape but this is just because of an
increase in neuron signaling due to a stimulus. It will never give us the
ability to look and experience the future and then come back to the present to
do what needs to be done to fix things.
Also, if this alien race can look into the future whenever
they wanted to why didn’t they already have a way to communicate with us. They
had plenty of time to sort through all our information that we are continually
sending out into space. With all the signal we send out and with their ability
to see the future why couldn’t they write in our language and make some sort of
index for us to learn from. Things would have gone faster and people wouldn’t
have tried to blow them up killing one of them. If they had some sort of prime
directive to prevent them from doing so they wouldn’t have been allowed to
travel to our planet and teach us their language at all.
Moving away from language let’s talk about gravity. Gravity
is the universal attraction between all matter. The more mass an object has to
more gravity it influences on its surroundings. If they had something with
enough mass to counteract the gravity of the earth, then anything that got
close to the ship should have just fallen to it. The shouldn’t have had to
climb halfway into it in order to become subject to its gravity. Motion can
create an alternative to gravity but if that were the case their ship would
have had to be round and constantly spinning. Maybe they had some other type of
technology to create and artificial gravity but it was never mentioned and we
don’t have any explanations to support that.
The last thing I wanted to complain about was their atmosphere.
It makes sense that for a being that large they needed to be suspended in some
type of fluid if to prevent them from collapsing under gravity. We know that
their atmosphere was fluid because when she was transported into their ship
here hair moved about like it was in water and she was wet when she left. How
was she able to breathe it? She couldn’t have. Not only would their atmosphere probably
be built of something other than ours (they are aliens) but we also cannot
breathe a liquid. She should have either drowned or at the very lease died from
lack of oxygen in the atmosphere or some toxic substance than is harmless to
the aliens. She really should have died.
So these are my main complaints. I’m
sure there are other problems with the movie. The acting was good and it was
well written. I am just insulted at how bad the science was.
Some Sources:
Le Poidevin, Robin, "The
Experience and Perception of Time", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/time-experience/>.
Gravity Definition from Britannica.com
Arrival movie Title from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arrival_2016_Film.png
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from dictionary.com
