The summary. Following the arrival of 12 extraterrestrial spaceships, which position themselves over different and distant cities across the globe, a woman, who is an expert linguist, and a physicist are thrown into a race against time, as they try to establish communication with the space beings, as world fear grows with each second that the alien’s visit remains a mystery, in “Arrival”.
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| Poster in English for 'Arrival' |
Once she is in the base, Louise meets physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who is going to be her working partner, in the daunting assignment of trying to establish a successful line of communication with the mysterious alien beings.
At the military base, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) shows Louise and Ian how they have been maintaining constant communication with the 11 other places of the world that also have alien spaceships in their skies, among them Venezuela, Siberia and China, and although everybody is trying to communicate with the aliens, nobody has successfully been able to.
Every day, at a specific time, the aliens open a hatch below the ship, where they allow the humans to enter the craft, all the way to a chamber, which is intended for communication with the aliens. It is in that chamber where Louise begins to use her linguistic abilities, in the hope of coming up with an effective way of communication.
Nevertheless, Louise and Donnelly must hurry up in their efforts, as tension begins to build up in the other cities with alien crafts, particularly in the one in China, where fear that the aliens may be hostile is spreading, while the governments start to consider a preemptive attack on the ships, as a way of protection.
The review. When the first commercials and trailers for “Arrival” began to appear in different forms of visual media, the publicity suggested yet another one of those action flicks of humans versus aliens full of amazing battles. Fortunately, “Arrival” is nothing of the sort. What it is, is an excellent science fiction movie which requires a more introspective viewing on the part of the moviegoers, much in the same way other recent sci-fi movies, such as “Gravity” and “The Martian”, required from their respective audiences.
In fact, this motion picture, directed by Denis Villeneuve, is nothing like those noisy sci-fi movies, with battles filled with astonishing visual effects, but not much substance, such as “Independence Day” or “Battle L.A.”. No, “Arrival” is more the type of science fiction visual story that makes you reflect about what it means to be human, upon the discovery of alien intelligent life, like “Contact”, “Interstellar” and even “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
There are even moments in the visual narrative of “Arrival”, in which time sort of becomes malleable, and we the viewers learn and find out about things, much in the way as it happens in several scenes from Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”. I won’t say more about this detail, as I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises that this film has in store for every viewer.
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| Another poster in English for 'Arrival' |
But Villeneuve doesn’t invest too much time in the scenes of the aliens’ arrival to this world; instead we are immediately thrown to the important matters at hand, as we see Louise (Amy Adams) being flown to the base to promptly get to work. Up to this point we already know some things about her past –or at least, we believe we do-, but as I mention before, the film has plenty of surprises in store for us, as well as an ingenious plot twist, worthy of any of M. Night Shymalan’s best films.
Amy Adams remarkable performance is undoubtedly one of the high points of this film. As Louise Banks, her gaze, her facial expression always shows us amazement, as she is learning more and more about the aliens, and trying to learn their reasons for visiting this planet. At the same time, she is very convincing in showing emotional fragility.
Without a doubt, “Arrival” is an Amy Adams movie, however, the rest of the cast also do great work; Forest Whitaker, Jeremy Renner and even Michael Stuhlbarg, whose shady agent Halpern could be considered the movie’s villain (although nothing in this film is quite that black and white), all of them are essential to the picture.
About the extraterrestrial themselves, I don’t want to say too much, again, because I don’t want to spoil surprises, just to comment that we do get to see them (and hear them) very clearly in the film. Watching this film’s ET’s I couldn’t help but think of some of the works of writer H. P. Lovecraft.
The screenplay of “Arrival” is based on the short tale “The Story of Your Life”, by Ted Chiang, which, as of this publication, I have yet to read. But to my knowledge, even though the film retains the central idea of that story, a lot of the other thematic elements, political as well as dramatic, were added for the purpose of enriching the film’s own story.
The movie adaptation of Chiang’s story was done by Eric Heisserer, who also wrote the good horror film that is “Lights Out”, directed by David F. Sandberg. Eric Heisserer, in my opinion, also did a great job with the film story of “The Thing” (2010), the prequel to John Carpenter’s famous horror flick of the same name, which was released in 1982.
In “The Thing”, Heisserer ingeniously combined John W. Campbell Jr.’s story “Who Goes There”, with events suggested by Carpenter’s film, in order to create his own version of the events which occurred before the 80’s horror story.
Heisserer put this creative talent at work again with the script of “Arrival”, which in turn was used terrifically by filmmaker Villeneuve, resulting in a magnificent sci-fi motion picture that captures us, the viewers, from the outset and doesn’t let go throughout the whole ride, even when the movie takes turns that might baffle some moviegoers.
Rating: * * * 1/2
Main cast and details
Title: ‘Arrival’
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenplay: Eric Heisserer
Country: United States
Year: 2016
Genre: Drama / Science Fiction
Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma and Forest Whitaker
Rated: PG-13 (Some material may not be not appropriate for children under 13 years of age)
Running Time: 1 hour and 56 minutes
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