ARRIVAL
DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve
CAST: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Michael Stuhlbarg, Forest Whitaker
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG
RUNNING TIME: 116 minutes
RATING: 4 stars (out of 5)
BY THERESA SMITH
A VERY smart sci-fi movie about an alien and human encounter, Arrival makes Interstellar look very bloated and overdone.
It is a slow boil, intriguing and eerie puzzle that you figure out a few seconds before the character does. It’s a film built around the concept of language.Director Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Incendies, Prisoners) tells emotionally-charged stories about the impact of violence, but here he creates an intimate story about scary aliens from outer space that is nothing like you think it will be.
Taut, well-paced and tense, Arrival tells the story of a linguist who is trying to decode an alien race’s language. Unlike so many other sci-fi movies, though, this one doesn’t suddenly gloss over the process, instead concentrating on the how – and thereby it says a whole lot about the nature of being and how our language shapes how we think.While the themes are huge, the film concentrates on the story of one person and how she experiences the events, the touchstone for the audience to measure how we would do it.As linguist Louise Banks, Amy Adams grounds the film with a solidly engaging performance.
When Banks is shown, the camera homes in tight on Adams’s face, showing us her responses to what is happening, but the camera goes wide on everyone and everything else, especially the aliens.Along with theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Banks is recruited by US Army Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) to help the American team make first contact. Twelve huge alien space crafts have landed in seemingly random places on Earth and, while the world’s population collectively loses its cool, 12 teams follow different approaches to deciphering the aliens’ intentions.The eventual alien language structure is complex and beautiful, and totally unrooted in time, and the film also plays loose and fast with chronology as the alien encounter scenes are interspersed with shots of Banks’s relationship with her daughter.
Even if you know Ted Chiang’s original short story that sparked this film, you won’t quite know where it is going. While Johann Johannsson’s haunting, vocal-rich score is specifically created for Arrival, the last part of the film uses Max Richter’s hypnotic On the Nature of Daylight, which takes you back to the beginning of the film. Then, like the main character, you have to ask yourself, if you knew how your life would unfold, would you still make the same choices?
If you liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, you will get this.