Arrival by
director Denis Villeneuve might be my favorite movie of the year. It’s
definitely in the discussion, and probably the frontrunner at this point (which
is no small feat, given that it’s up against movies like Sing Street and Swiss Army
Man*). And on the one hand, that shouldn’t seem like too much of a
surprise. The novella that it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of
writing.
*I meant to write
about each of these earlier in the year and never got around to it. Maybe I’ll
circle back around if I have time.
But it’s not always that simple. When the adaptation was
first announced, I was incredibly skeptical that such a project would work. After
all, when you look at the story, it has approximately zero or even negative
overlap with what you would traditionally associate with a blockbuster movie.
I mean, it’s a hard science fiction story that’s mainly
about how linguists would handle a first contact situation, with long passages
of exposition informing the reader about the mechanics of the process and an
inverse amount of action. Meanwhile, it’s structurally non-linear with a major
emotional twist that hinges on the medium being prose; the second that it would
be displayed visually, it would give itself away. If any of that screams “$50
million blockbuster” to you, you’re lying to yourself.
And yet, they pulled it off. It may be the best adaptation
of an already-incredible source material since…shoot, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World maybe? And much like Scott Pilgrim, it’s perfect in part
because it realizes the key to making a great movie from a great book (/short
story/series of graphic novels, in these cases) is not to make it a 1:1
adaptation of the source material, but instead to understand the different
constraints of the different mediums and make changes to preserve the feel of
the original in a way that works better for the screen.
What I’d like to do here is just dig in a little deeper to
those changes, and pull apart what they are and why they were made. And I’m
going to try and do it in a way that doesn’t spoil either Arrival or Story of Your Life
because, seriously, they’re fantastic and everyone should check them out.
However, if you have only seen the former or read the latter, that should be
fine. The film is a faithful adaptation, know that the basic story beats are
the same, and you already know where the other is headed*. Hopefully, I will be
a good enough writer to explain the situation, whether you experience one,
both, or neither.
*I mention this
because I was concerned that the short story would be made unrecognizable to
work as a movie script, but this was thankfully not the case.
First, to fit in with the demands for of modern
blockbusters, Arrival needed the
addition of some form of “excitement”. The original short story was much more
exploratory in nature, with the conflict being driven more from a question of
whether the aliens could be communicated with. Thankfully, screenwriter Eric
Heisserer resisted the temptation to make that addition “action scenes”, like I
feared might be the case based on advertisements. Instead, he expands the role
of the military to add tension with the main characters over a difference in
approach over how to deal with the aliens, a good way to underscore the themes
of the piece without feeling out of place.
But the most masterful translation might be the successful
preservation of the original story’s twist. As mentioned, in Story of Your Life, Chiang is able to
conceal a major surprise by virtue of not having to visually portray something.
It can shock you with the “what” of the story (what is going on, essentially).
Villenueve and Heisserer thankfully decided they needed to find some way to
translate this emotional gut-punch. But how does one do that?
Similar to the first problem, by extrapolating from the
text. The book explained the “how” of the problem (how the language works, how
language and perception overlap) so that it could shock you with the “what”
(what it ultimately means. With that option out of the question, they instead
lay all their cards on the table from the start. With that “what” out of the
way, they manage the same emotion gut-punch that Ted Chiang pulled off instead
using the “how” of the story; namely, how all the events fit together. They
mimic the story’s non-linear style to obscure all of the implications of the
events, while also developing their own connections to deepen the meaning of
the reveal. And these new connective ideas, while not necessary in the original
(one of them even explicitly changes a fundamental aspect of the original in
fact, while the other is totally absent), do add a lot to the story, especially
with regards to its theme of interconnectedness.
I’m simultaneously worried that I both didn’t explain myself
well enough and gave away too much and any further explanation would certainly
give everything away, so that’s probably a good sign to stop for the time
being. They key take away from this should be that everyone should check out Arrival, as well as Story of Your Life even if they weren’t both fantastic on their
own, comparing the two is highly instructive.