Arrival
Made: 2016
Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter: Eric Hiesserer
Cinematographer: Bradford Young
Producer: Shawn Levy, Dan Levine
Arrival is a very odd name for this movie, since so much of the movie does not focus on the “arrival” of the aliens but in communicating with them. Perhaps what it refers to is the arrival of truth at the film’s end. The aliens in the picture constantly try to communicate with the humans, and we live this process via Amy Adams’s language expert character. We don’t really try and talk to them on our own, as everything is a response to an action the aliens perform (almost as if they had this planned out?). This is how the director of the movie, Denis Villeneuve, communicates his language to the audience and this journey is an arrival of a movie that is aware of cinema’s past and its future.
Everything in Arrival is fluid and expertly done, from the brilliant camera work by Bradford Young (who also shot Selma, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and A Most Violent Year to name a few) to the pulsating score (Johan Joahnsonn, genius composer who has since passed away) to the merging of several timelines which effortlessly tell a story. In a lot of ways, Arrival is the perfection and culmination of the extra-terrestrial sci fi movies of the 21st century so far: from District 9 to Prometheus to Interstellar, we have somehow gotten here and it makes us stop and reanalyze it all. Amy Adams gives her best performance to date which is saying a lot since she is one of the great movie actresses of all time by this point, and Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker to a great job backing her up.
There is little action in the movie- an explosion is shoehorned in during a subplot in the middle - and there is media coverage footage showing how different countries react to what they assume is a threat. But it all connects to the current events of the times, as our inability to communicate with China or Russia or just any other language on Earth. The Language barrier is the problem. It may lead to disaster because people get scared when they do not understand something as simple as language and perceive anything or anyone different then themselves as a threat or an alien. The depth of allegories could fill a book, easily.
Denis Villeneuve had a streak of movies from the daring and quite hard to watch school shooting Polytechnique (2009), the familial catastrophe of Incendies (2010), the brutal, more universally excepted murder mystery of Prisoners (2013), the arty doppelganger mystery of Enemy (2014), the blistering and brutal drug carter border drama Sicario (2015), and the impossible task of following up a classic but succeeding with Blade Runner 2047 (2017). He then took off several years to make his own two part version of Dune, a sci fi epic previously attempted and always failed because of its confusing and hard to film novel premise. If any one can conquer the subject matter of Dune, it will be him, as he seems to be able to direct stories while connecting with the audience in a meaningful way unlike anyone else in his generation save Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg. I’d like to see him tackle a comedy, because he seems to have no limits of genre when making movies great. Because he tends to create movies in the action or sci-fi realms, he has alluded Oscar recognition for the better part of his career, which is a shame, as he was easily the most effective director of the 2010’s.
Arrival presents us with many ideas, the most powerful being: what is the connection between time and language? The alien’s language in Arrival, revealed as a symbol of circular fluid, is a metaphor for the circle of the plot of the film itself. There are so many mediocre alien invasion movies over the last fifty years of movie making that Arrival is like a masterclass in how to do it right: accessible to the mainstream movie going public and as metaphysical and analytical as the mysteries of the universe. There are many unanswered questions that thrill the mind rather than frustrate it, and so many places where the movie could have faltered but it never does. This may be Amy Adams best cinematic performance yet but acting “itself” is almost made irrelevant throughout the course of the movie that it is easy to overlook; this movie immerses the viewer in an alien spaceship and makes one reexamine their entire existence. Arrival simply does the best job of communicating and illustrating its point than any other movie of the decade.