I found this in a folder this morning while looking for something that I still haven't found. I moved it from the desktop to a folder — how long ago? — and then apparently forgot that it existed. It's a bit out of date, but I'm posting it because it made me feel like rewatching both movies mentioned. I would encourage everyone to do the same.

I was disappointed by the reviews and the general response to Arrival. It was, I thought, an absolutely brilliant film. I experienced something similar in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray jumped out of the car to work his way through a crowd and say something to Scarlett Johansson — an important closure. Everyone seemed to hear what he said, but everyone heard something different. What he said, in fact, could not be heard. That was, of course, very important, but it was also beyond the reach of all the viewers I talked to. The ending of Arrival is a collection of past, present and future, and yet no one seemed to be aware of that. When Louise Banks hugs Ian Donnelly in the end, she says, “I forgot how good it was to hold you.” But she hasn’t held him yet. And when he asks if she wants to make a baby, she says yes, and the baby we next see is Hannah in the same blanket as at the beginning of the film. Hannah is somewhat ambiguous as a cowboy. She is also in blue. These little hints are meant to misdirect. Ian is shown out of focus for the most part to complete the notion that he either is or is not the father of Hannah, that we are seeing him in the future or else Hannah’s father in the past. Louise learns to remember calling General Shang. She flips through an empty book and finds the title page — and then is lecturing about it. These are different points in the existence of the book and of our fictional understanding of the Universal Language. To most people this was just stuff that happened at the end. A good many were already on their way back to the car, and home, and television.