Arrival

Rating

Director

Denis Villeneuve

Screenplay

Eric Heisserer (Story: Ted Chiang)

Length

116 min.

Starring

Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Michael Stuhlbarg, Forest Whitaker, Mark O’Brien, Tzi Ma, Jadyn Malone, Abigail Pniowsky, Julia Scarlett Dan

MPAA Rating

PG-13 for brief strong language

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Review

Looking towards the future is such a key part of our societal identity. Through science fiction, we can see the possibilities of the future and hope to one day accomplish them. Arrival may seem to be superficially about an alien encounter, but it speaks volumes about how we interact with each other and how that can create wedges towards meeting and understanding the future.

Amy Adams brings humility and humanity to the role of Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics professor brought in by the U.S. military after twelve strange alien vessels perch themselves above various random locales around the globe. The goal is to help foster communications between the two species and come to understand what the aliens’ purpose is. Arrival also brings in Jeremy Renner as a theoretical physicist, Oscar winner Forest Whitaker as the operation’s military leader, and Michael Stuhlbarg as the CIA agent assigned to protect the nation’s security.

As Louise works tirelessly with Renner’s Ian Donnelly, we see a woman who understands the tenets of linguistic communication while finding compassion and understanding for her subjects. It’s through these interactions that we witness Adams’ dreams of the teenage daughter she lost to cancer. These memories help guide her steadily through the challenging interpersonal dialogue between aliens and mankind, a struggle complicated by Chinese and Russian officials leaning towards quick military escalation rather than slow communication and negotiation.

Director Denis Villeneuve doesn’t allow his audience to worry about the film’s length. The whole film is deliberately and intelligently paced. It may seem like little happens over the course of the film, but looking back at the whole reveals a great deal of information and plot detail that must be consumed and processed in order to understand what’s going on.

Adams is superb in the lead role. It’s a challenging part, one that doesn’t rely overtly on histrionics, but that suits Adams just fine. There are few actresses working today with the vast range Adams possesses. A quick look at her filmography shows just how many different personalities she’s exhibited and this film is no different. Her role is methodic, contemplative, strong, and tenacious.

The entirety of the film’s success lies on Adams’ shoulders. While Renner, Whitaker, and Stuhlbarg are fine, none of them deliver definitive or exemplary performances. This shows a concerted aim on screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s part to ensure that Adams’ character isn’t upended or overridden by her male compatriots. For the film to succeed, Adams and her character must dominate and that’s a terrific thing to see.

There are a lot of things to be said about the story, but digging into too many details risks revealing significant plot developments. Suffice it to say, this is one of the most pensive, considerate, and intricately written science fiction films in recent memory. Not since Contact have we had a film that was so unconcerned about what the aliens looked like, instead looking at an exploration of humanity, and its courage.

The musical score, dominated through much of the running time by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Oscar-caliber work, is bookended by Max Richter’s gorgeous “On the Nature of Daylight.” That haunting score, combined with Jóhannsson’s chilling, atmospheric composition, help drive the film’s narrative and emotional throughlines. This is a film where suspense, dread, and anticipation are carefully set up by the masterful blend of score and sound effects. The aural landscape here is better than most of what gets made in sound studios today.

Arrival is an unusual film in that its slow-burn build enraptures the audience in ways it didn’t realize it wanted. While it might be easy to quibble about the film’s final moments, it’s the kind of movie that pulls you in with its introspective, thought-provoking cinematic style. The concept may be heavily structured, but the end result makes the carefully crafted script worth it.

Spoiler Discussion

This is the kind of film that demands a spoiler warning before discussing certain matters. Arrival‘s plot twist is as crucial to the film’s successes as any ever written. Knowing the end, completely re-orients your view and perception of the movie detrimentally if you haven’t already seen it. As such, I recommend you stop reading now before proceeding.

The questions posed by Arrival are all present within its title, not only the alien beings’ arrival on the planet, but also the arrival of Louise’s child. Both have significant impact on the film’s narrative, but only one of them forms the crux for the film’s successes.

Among the early encounters with the aliens, they display their written language, a circular ink blot that doesn’t seem to have any familiar qualities; However, it’s one of the first realizations that the looped designs represents an understanding of language in a temporal context. Namely that the aliens with whom they have been communicating, have the capacity to think in terms of time. They simultaneously speak with an understanding of past, present, and future, informing the exact structure of their written language, a concept human civilizations haven’t even fathomed.

To put the concept in layman’s terms, they are essentially precognitive. They are able to see and think forward and backward in time, pulling forth information both from the past and the future at the same time as the present. This becomes crucial to understanding the film’s plot and helps form a fascinating backbone to the events transpiring. It is Louise who, through her dreams, has begun to experience current events in relation to past and future events.

This is where the film must carefully lay the groundwork for its massive narrative throughline. Everything at the end of the film must comport with what has transpired before. Clues are lightly infused into each scene, leading ultimately to the finale, which calls into question our own memories of the film and allows us to understand the complexity of the narrative without feeling cheated or confused.

While Arrival does not specifically deal with time travel, the general observations about the cyclical nature of cause and effect within time-oriented films is on display. Some science fiction films, like Looper, casually toss all concerns and questions out with a cheap throw-away line or incredible leap of logic to alleviate audience’s concern without having to deal with it. Others, like Star Trek: First Contact, create a brilliant narrative device that enables the events to take place while carefully threading the temporal needle to get back to a balanced state. Arrival falls into this latter category efficiently.

Understanding the plot threads is only a small part of the whole puzzle, the sense of catharsis when the truth is revealed is played fairly, though some elements of it are a bit forced. That the entire film is so incredibly subtle, those final moments of stilted explanation feel a touch flat. It doesn’t distract from the whole enough to merit too much annoyance, though.

The film also posits a unique perspective on parenthood and responsibility. The film asks the audience to consider whether time is indeed malleable or if it is entirely rigid. Science fiction has dealt with time-based questions often and they do so by looking at the cause-and-effect relationship suggesting that any change to the past will irrevocably destroy the future. Doctor Who has a compelling way of handling that concept, but Arrival‘s subtlety on the issue deserves consideration.

At the end of the film, after all is revealed, Louise asks whether one should bring life into the world knowing that it will suffer measurably. In Louise’s case, the decision has added weight. Will her choice directly impact all that has transpired or will the mere idea of it remain in lieu of mitigating factors. We’re never presented the answer, leaving behind a fascinating theoretical concept that deserves thoughtful exploration.

Arrival is a film that features myriad layers of ideas. It gives the audience a host of topics on which to ruminate and, for science fiction, that’s a great place to leave things.

Oscar Prospects

Guarantees: Sound Mixing, Sound Editing
Probables: Original Score, Film Editing
Potentials: Picture, Actress (Amy Adams), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Visual Effects

Review Written

November 17, 2016