Arrival
The idea that understanding a system is the same act as changing it.
- Director
- Denis Villeneuve
- Year
- 2016
- Runtime
- 116 min
A film about representation dressed up as a film about aliens. Learning the language changes thought; learning the model changes the problem itself.
That feels very familiar. The moment you start measuring a system its behaviour changes, because the team starts working to the metric. I spent the film thinking about Goodhart’s law, which was probably not the intention.
Villeneuve’s least showy film and, I think, his best.