After a really good hard science fiction in the form of Interstellar I really hoped for another good movie, but instead we got a movie so badly written and so many infuriatingly stupid plot elements that not even the plot from the Hugo and Nebula award-winning short story can redeem it.
But since many people haven't seen the movie yet and some of you may still want to (because we live in a desperate age where a movie with a single good idea and 80% horrible stupid apeshit is still among the better movies of the season), I will refrain from spoilers beyond those that are already revealed in the trailer and talk about the first 30m of the movie.
So instead of writing about how badly Arrival treats the interesting topic of cross-cultural linguistic barriers, or about how utterly retarded is the political plot in the movie, let's talk about the first fifteen minutes of the movie. You will find that we can learn quite a lot about what's wrong with our world.
Our protagonist is a leading researcher in linguistics. Now of course for this kind of task you would need a theoretical linguists AND a lot of mathematicians, information theoreticians, philosophers and a super large bunch of cultural anthropologists.
Theoretical linguists are not even focused on learning languages, so being a super-translator of a dozen languages says nothing about your achievment as a theoretical linguists. Also when you want to decipher a totally alien form of communication, you will most likely need that part of theoretical linguistics that is a kind of mathematics. So the compliment in the movie from the 'scientist' that "You think like a mathematician, not a linguist" was quite a facepalm moment for me.
But of course in a movie where the partner of the protagonist is simply identified as a "scientist" without any field of specialty (and than he works exactly on the same problems as the linguist) we can't really except them to represent such nuances.
So we have our super linguist here. But here comes Hollywood's recent mantra: "show, don't tell" and that exposition (when something is explained to the viewer) is a bad bad thing. This attitude became so widespread that almost all of the movie critics have embraced it.
Just think about it, Star Wars started with a written(!) exposition that explained the starting situation. Many action movies in the 80s and 90s employed written introductions or voiceover expositions that inform us about the starting situation. Nowadays this is close to being unacceptable.
So the makers of the movie want to show us that our heroine is a super linguist. The problem of course that it is quite difficult to show in a movie scene...so the colonel tells us how Dr. Banks (our protagonist) helped them translate a tape of terrorist meeting from Farsi and how impressed he was with how quickly she did it.
WTF?
Do you know what Farsi is? It is also called Persian. It is spoken by over 50 million people. It is the official language of Iran. Which is one of the chief rivals of US. It is also an official language in Afganisthan, where US troops spent the last decade.
Do you seriously tell us that the CIA and the military doesn't have any Farsi translators? That they need an outsider, a university teacher to translate for them from Farsi? We are even told that she had to go through some security clearance so they could give her those tapes.
And wtf is "how quickly" she translated it? It is a living, spoken language. If someone speaks it at a native or almost native level, she will translate it at the speed of speech.It is not ancient chinese where it can really take years of research to decipher a text.
Also don't forget, this is an American movie. The US is a nation where the war in Afganistan and the struggles with Iran got a hell of a lot of attention. The way this movie portrays the army and the CIA is ridiculous. (And later in the movie they will have Dr Banks translate from Chinese!)
The truth is, that could be the whole point. To portray the army, the CIA, the government and the establishment as totally incompetent and unable to do anything without the hero. There is a deep mistrust in the establishment in recent Hollywood movies. This is even more evident in action movies, like Transformers, where an everyday Joe does the job what is supposed to be done by the government. Gone are the days when action heroes were policemen or professional soldiers.
In the middle of the movie our two protagonists even have a discussion that "everything we achieved is thanks to you ... I think all the others around us are idiots".
The other members of the scientific team don't even have a name!
I don't know if their faces are shown at all.
No wonder that the makers of the movie did not put together an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, linguists, philosophers and cultural anthropologists. They were interested in delivering the lonely hero in the midst of many incompetent idiots message.
This individualism and distrust in establishment reaches down to the epistemical level as seen in the "show, don't tell" doctrine. It says that you can't trust something just because the established institutions of academia says so. Only trust what you personally experience.
This is explicitly stated in the dialogue when the colonel from the army recruits Dr Banks. They ask her to translate from an audio playback, she refuses and says that she needs personal interaction for this task. (Which is actually stupid, a full audio and video feed would be sufficient - also the touch the window thing, which our heroine proclaims "That's a proper introduction" does not lead to any bit of understanding).
So, how does she establish understanding?
This is where the movie starts to get really bad. You see anyone who thought about how to establish communication with another species reached the conclusion that mathematics would be the best idea, starting with prime numbers. Our protagonist ridicules this idea, and instead advocates the importance of personal interaction to avoid misunderstandings, as in pointing at myself and saying/writing my name - and the central message of the movie is that this is the correct approach.
The protagonist is cheered for trusting her "gutt feeling" and for sticking with a personal approach, while proper science, established science, the cold headed, objective science is ridiculed. The message of this movie, and many others, is that established science, with its teamwork, with its skepticism toward extrapolations from a single experience is wrong, and the correct approach is that of a lone individual trusting in nothing but only her own personal experience (or gutt feeling) and interpersonal approach to the problem.
Except that this is not the correct approach. If you make a movie where the characters are constantly talking about how difficult is to create an understanding with an alien and remind each other and the viewer about the pitfalls of misunderstanding, you cannot just ignore all that and go for the worst method of communicating and state that this is what works.
What's the problem with pointing at yourself and saying your name? Everything.
Think about it: what do you think if someone points at himself and says "zagzag". You think that "zagzag" means that person. What do you think if he points at his arm and says "zigzig"? That "zigzig" means an arm. What if he points at his feet and says "zegzeg"? "Zegzeg"means feet. He points at his nose and says "zogzog? "Zogzog" means nose.
Maybe, unless you met a Chinese person, because Chinese do not point at their chests when they want to refer to themselves, they point at their nose! So "zogzog" means not nose, but the speaker himself, while "zagzag" just means the chest or perhaps the torso.
That approach which is shown as the super correct one actually fails miserably if you go to the next continent!
Also how do you know what is pointing at something? If I point at my arm and say a word, you guess that I am telling you the word for "arm" in my language. But if instead of having my fingers forward, I gesture with the edge of my hand, as if doing a karate-chop? Someone mimicing chopping off an arm, that's what you would think and not pointing at the arm!
If I move my hand toward my chest with fingers forward or with palm forward you interpret it as pointing at the chest. But if I move my hand with the back of it toward the chest, you wouldn't recognize that movement as pointing at something!
Even if you recognize the act of pointing at something, say, your chest, and saying "Louise", what would you think "Louise" means? Chest? Shirt? The colour orange? Even if you guess that she is referring to herself, how do you interpret the word? "Me"? or the name of that individual? Or human? Or female? Or woman? Or scientist? Or perhaps peaceful? Friend? Not-an-enemy?
Heck, even the Stargate movie did better to this problem than Arrival. In that movie they met a local, who spoke a dialect of ancient egyptian, so they couldn't understand him. They gave him a chocolate bar and he smiled and said a word. They thought he meant "tasty".
Later they were greeted at the village and offered a feast. Our heroes tasted to food while all the villagers were holding back their breath. So they repeated the word they heard and thought to mean "tasty". There was a big upheaval, because that word actually meant "sweet", and while the chocolate was indeed sweet, the meat was not supposed to be. So when they wanted to show their satisfaction they actually frightened the locals who thought they were dissatisfied with the food.
So here is this movie, which ridicules mathematics and a cold headed approach to understanding and advocates the personalized approach. But the personalized approach is the most prone to misunderstandings!
This is also true on an epistemological level. Distrusting the knowledge generated by established procedures and turning toward personal experience is the best recipe for disaster. This might not sound as sexy, but science works by being cold headed, by being impersonal and by collecting a lot of data and not making hastly generalizations based on single points of data.
But people are now turning away from that approach and from the knowledge it generates. This attitude is well reflected and strongly reinforced in the movies. Because movies are the primary source of stories in the modern world, and stories are powerful tools in shaping man and society.
So don't be surprised that more and more people trust their own personal experience that "homeotherapy worked for me when I got cold last november, so it is true!" while they ignore all the research that proves that homeotherapy is a bogus. They are just behaving as their heroes in Hollywood movies do! Distrusting institutions and the establishment and prefering their own individual, personal experiences as the only facts.
So we should take heed. We should worry about Hollywood producing brain-dead shit in large quantities but we should also use this to improve our understanding about the problems around us.
In the last few years many political analysists have complained about the "post-factual era" we arrived, with anti-vaccine movement, radicalization of political discource, with Brexit and the recent US elections.
But I think that "post-factual" is a misnomer and shows a misunderstanding about the phenomena.
You see the real problem is not that people stopped checking the facts. Because they never did. The problem is that they stopped trusting the people who did actually check out the facts: scientists, analystists and such. Instead they focus much more on the facts they have access to: their own personal experiences.
So the problem is not post-factuality but being post-academic and post-scientific. It was quite clear during the Brexit campaign: the credibility of the experts became the main battlefield.
People do not ignore facts any more they did. Actually I think they pay more attention to them - at least to the ones they have easy access to: their own personal experiences. That is the problem. Our shared sources of knowledge, the ones that generate more-or-less objective knowledge with critical thinking and aggregation of many facts are the ones getting ignored. This is closely related to distrust in the establishment.
That is why the way science was portrayed in this movie and many others should make all of us very sad.
And we must also understand that this rising tide of stupidity is not a post-factual world. Simply talking about the importance of facts will not help us. The problem is actually this new empiricism of heroic individualism. This is a post-academia world and if we want to fix it, we have to go back and emphasise trust in the institutionalized methods of generating reliable knowledge from the facts.
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