Entrepreneurial Role Models In The Film Arrival
Plot Overview
Twelve spacecrafts drop in twelve parts of the Earth. Colonel Weber, who is a U. S. Army officer, recruits Louise Banks who is a linguistic expert and physicist Ian Donnelly to discover why they have landed on Earth. He takes them to a camp near one of the spacecrafts. Louise and Ian start discovering their purpose of coming on Earth by understanding their written language. As Louise is communicating with them through their language, she starts to have flashbacks of her unborn daughter Hannah.
Finally Louise gets succeed to understand their language and find out why the aliens have come, their purpose is 'to offer weapon' they said. However, China translates this as 'to use weapon', so they stop their communications with aliens, and other nations follow China. Louise argues that the symbol interpreted as 'weapon' might mean 'tool'.
On their last visit to the aircraft, the aliens give them a very complex message. Ian thinks that there are symbols of time in their message. He also discovers that the writing is exactly one-twelfth of the space in which it is produced. Louise suggests that the other parts of the message are distributed among the other 11 crafts. Aliens did that intentionally to make all the nations work together and share what they have learned.
China's General Shang demands that all the nations must leave their camps within 24 hours; Russia, Pakistan, and Sudan follows China. Meanwhile, a shuttle transport goes down to carry Louise to the craft. On of the aliens clarifies that they have come to help humanity, and the weapon is their language, which opens time so that humans will be able to travel in time and see the future, so we understand that why Louise sees visions of her unborn daughter. She is involving herself deeply into the alien language, which is resulted in rewiring her brain and foreseeing the future events. By the process of learning alien’s language, she begins to see visions of her future life. She sees visions of her yet-to-be-born daughter; who will get sick and die of cancer.
With the ability to travel over time, Louise convinces General Shang to call off the war against aliens and the other nations follow suit. In the future, she takes General’s private number and then in the present time she calls his private number and by repeating his wife’s dying words, she convince him to cooperate understanding aliens language. The Chinese general announce that they release the part of the message that they have. The other countries accordingly release their parts and the crafts disappear immediately. When they are evacuating the camp, Ian expresses his love for Louise. Despite knowing their fate that Hannah will die, and Ian will leave her after she reveals that she knew this and don’t tell him, Louise agrees to have a child with him.
Scenes with instances of entrepreneurial behaviours
Self Confidence
When Louise is in her office at university, US Army Colonel Weber comes to visit and asks her to use her linguistic skills for translating an ambiguous recording of aliens’ sound or speech. Colonel says, “Two years ago you did some Farsi translation for Army intelligence, you made quick work of those insurgent videos. You are on the top of everybody’s list when it comes to translation. ” After hearing she replies, “It is impossible to translate from an audio file. I need to be there to interact with them. ” Colonel says but you didn’t need that for the Farsi translation in the past and she responds because I already knew the language. As it is explained in part one about entrepreneurial characteristics, self-confidence, which means an entrepreneur believes that he is capable to achieve determined goals. Although Louise is an expert linguist, her specialty is in the languages that she already knows about. In this scene Louise confidently accept the challenge of translating a new language that she does not know anything about and this can prove her sense of self-confidence to accept a new challenge in her life. At night, Colonel Weber comes over to her place with a helicopter and escort Louise. In the helicopter she meets Ian Donnelly who is a physicist and is going to work with Louise to understand other aspects of aliens. Ian reads a phrase that is a preface of Louise scientific writing. “Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict” Ian quotes of Louise’s work. He argues that this phrase is great although it is wrong since the cornerstone of civilization is science not language. Louise confidently replies that the most important thing is communication and math and science comes after that. In this part, Ian wants to point that his job is more important than Louise and he is going to ask scientific questions from aliens, but Louise has enough self-confidence about the importance of her job and what she is expert in. She says first, and most important thing is to understand their language and after that we can ask them scientific questions.
Innovativeness
On her second trip into the craft, Louise takes with her a visual aid. She says, “I am never going to be able to understand their words if they are talking, but they might have some sort of written language with basis of visual communication. ” She tries to communicate with them by writing 'human' on a small whiteboard. They perceive the written English word and respond with a circular symbol. One of the creatures emits a black cloud that forms a circular symbol, and this shows that they have written language and Louise is the first one who can find a way to communicate with them.
Innovativeness means acting or behaving in a new and unique way. Entrepreneurs do not favor ordinary products, methods, processes, services and they always try to improve them with innovations and Innovativeness is significantly correlated with success. Using written language to communicate with aliens is an innovative idea that Louise decides to use. Since there is a strong correlation between entrepreneurship and innovation, our second hypothesis is matched that Louise Banks is innovative, and her innovativeness is related with her success.
Propensity to Take Risks
On another trip to visit aliens, Louise attempts to introduce herself to them by writing “Louise” in the whiteboard but it seems that they got confused and do not get the message, because they reply with the same circular symbol that they produced last time. In a bold move, Louise removes her suit that protects her from radiation. She presses her hand to the barrier where the aliens are take place and as a response to Louise gesture, one of them extends a limp and presses it against the barrier. After Louise, Ian takes off his suit too. They write “Ian” on the board and he points to himself. The two aliens respond with two different symbols. They have names too. Ian names them Abbott and Costello.
As described earlier risk taking is defined as deciding on an unknown territory or unknown conditions, without knowing what the consequences will be. Entrepreneurs tend to take more risks than others and studies showed that risk taking is highly correlated with entrepreneurial intention. In this scene Louise decides to take off her radiation suit and her oxygen mask to get closer to them so that they can see her face and understand her message more clearly while other team members are dread and step back. She puts herself on the risk of contamination and radiation poisoning without caring possible negative consequences. This scene matches our 3rd hypothesis that: Louise Banks as a person has high propensity to take risks.
Need for Achievement
Louise and Ian go through a series of back and forth communication with the aliens over a period of time. The objective is to ask them “What is the purpose of your visit to Earth?” The aliens deliver a message that is translated to 'Use weapon', which generates tension among the other countries. Most people jump to a conclusion that the aliens intend to attack. The Chinese deliver an ultimatum to the aliens that they have 24 hours to leave, or the military will initiate a strike. A few of the army guys also decide (on their own) that they are going to bomb the craft and secretly place a bomb inside the craft.
Louise, on the other hand, is persistent that their interpretation of the alien language is wrong; that they do not intend to attack. She believes that they need to make sure the aliens know the difference between a weapon and a tool. She and Ian go up into the vessel by themselves, unaware that some of the soldiers placed a bomb in there. As they try to communicate with the aliens, they start to create a message with hundreds of tiny, scattered symbols. As the bomb is ready to detonate, Abbott drops Louise and Ian from the vessel as it explodes. Louise and Ian race to decode Abbott's message. Ian deduces that many of the symbols for 'time' are scattered, but he can't exactly determine what it all means.
The alien vessel, after the human attack, goes up higher. Humans lose the ability to enter the craft now. Furthermore, because of the preemptive bombing of the craft, people have to brace for a response attack and the base is being evacuated. They are preparing to go to war with the aliens. Meanwhile, Louise sees a glimpse of a small transportation module coming out of the main craft. She rushes toward the module, which takes her up to the craft. Costello tells her “Louise has the weapon. ” The weapon is their language that is nonlinear so that Louise can go over time and see the future. “Use weapon” actually meant “use gift”. The aliens have come to gift their language to the humans and by understanding their language; humans could able to see the future. According to McClelland's learned needs theory; individuals exhibit some behaviors to increase social relations with others, influence others, and gain a certain success with using their talents and skills in order to fulfill their needs. Aiming to achieve success is one of the reasons behind these behaviors. Perception of being successful is subjective; as personal attained value for the achievements varies through individuals. When a person completes a task, wins a contest, scores high on the exam, get overs a complicated situation he/she may feel succeeded something important. Need for achievement of Louise helped her again to put all her effort for solving this complicated problem and understanding the purpose of aliens for landing on the earth. So, our last hypothesis is matched that: Need for Achievement is one of the reasons behind Louise Banks’s actions
Conclusion
Louise Banks has entrepreneurial characteristics and practices them for the sake of saving humanity by preventing a potential catastrophe and reaches a considerable success. Although it should be emphasized these traits would be useless in absence of other resources like, strong team, deep knowledge in the field and physical resources.
In our paper we assumed the personality traits innovativeness, need for achievement and self-confidence and risk taking are helpful based on just one example. In other contexts these behaviors may not result in same consequences.
