Download Transcript

I decided to watch this movie  because I like sci-fi but was not expecting what I found.

Thought it was just another alien invasion movie. Could not be more wrong! The movie is not really about aliens at all!

Surprised? Well, I was too! But it was a pleasant surprise!

It focuses on language and the importance of communication and as a teacher and a lover of languages that part really stuck with me. I truly believe that if we communicated better or spoke each other languages better and understood and respected the differences in culture and habits many problems we face today could be avoided.

It also focuses on relationships and love. But before we get deeper into those issues lets summarize the plot.

12 spacecrafts land on earth in different countries. They float above the ground. Every 18 hours a hatch opens in the shell’s lower tip, admitting a delegation into the gravity-bending interior.

The aliens are called heptapods and they are a mixture of squid, spider, whale and mangrove. Their way of communicating as also unique. One symbol that seems like a coffee mug satin means whole phrases. They have something to say, and the race to figure out what it is gives the movie its amount of adrenaline and excitement you would expect from a sci-fy.

But why 12, exactly? And why those specific locations? I read somewhere that Arrival is a puzzle box.And they are right. Besides the aliens and the many questions they arouse, we have the main character played by Amy Adams. And there, inside her, seems to be an entire other story going on. Until we start getting a feeling her pain is connected to the main event. But we only figure out just how much her personal struggle and pain is connected to the vents and the flashes we see throughout the film are related to the aliens arrival towards the end.

It is one of those movies that make you reflect about quite a few things.

The exercises, flashcards and vocab list will be available until Sunday.