This week marks a decade since Arrival reached audiences, and its heptapod language remains a landmark in thoughtful sci-fi world-building. The film began as Ted Chiang’s Nebula-winning 1998 novella “Story of Your Life.” Screenwriter Eric Heisserer spent years pitching an adaptation before Dan Levine and Dan Cohen of 21 Laps Entertainment took interest. Denis Villeneuve came aboard wanting a science fiction film that felt right, and he changed the title because the original sounded like a romantic comedy; Arrival was the first title his producers and writers suggested.
Time was hidden in every logogram
On board the Montana craft, Ian Donnelly discovers that the symbol for time is present throughout the heptapods’ message and that the writing occupies exactly one-twelfth of the 3D space into which it is projected. Louise Banks reads that geometry as a clue: the full message is split between the twelve craft, and the heptapods want all the nations to collaborate in order to decipher it. The Russian team receives a message they translate as “there is no time,” which they interpret as a possible threat.
The written language is built from logograms
Before the time clue lands, the film establishes how the aliens write. Banks and Donnelly make contact with two cephalopod-like, seven-limbed aliens, whom they call “heptapods,” then research their complex written language, consisting of phrases written with logograms. The novella involves Earth’s first communication with heptapods who speak in a cryptic language.
One word, two very different readings
The stakes of that logogram system become clear when Louise asks why the heptapods have come. Their answer is a statement that could be translated as “offer weapon.” China interprets it as “use weapon,” prompting the country to break off communications, and other nations follow.
Mahjong shaped China’s translation
Banks argues that the symbol interpreted as “weapon” can be more abstractly related to the concepts of “means” or “tool.” She says China’s translation likely results from interacting with the heptapods using mahjong, a highly competitive game. The same marks read as threat or offer depending on the frame a culture brings.
A meeting room designed like a Turrell artwork
Production designer Patrice Vermette looked to the works of James Turrell, particularly for the design of the meeting room aboard the alien craft. In a February 2017 interview with Popular Mechanics, he explained: “I wanted the simplicity and the sensorial experience you feel in a room like that.” That big screen, called ‘the interview room’ in the script, works as a classroom and echoes in Louise’s house and her school classroom.
The ships were inspired by an asteroid
Rodeo FX completed 60 visual shots for the film, and said that its biggest challenge was the sequence in which Louise and Ian first enter the alien craft. The heptapod ships themselves took their look from an unlikely reference: the asteroid 15 Eunomia.
Arrival’s language design works because every mark is tied to time, trust and the need to cooperate. Which detail convinced you first?
Facts from Wikipedia: Arrival (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
