Arrival is not your usual alien movie, and that’s why it works
If you walk into the movie Arrival expecting an alien movie like Independence Day, you’re going to be disappointed. Instead, Arrival follows in the veins of more cerebral and ambitious sci-fi movies like Interstellar and Contact, eschewing big explosions and action scenes for quiet moments and intimacy.
The movie starts by breaking your heart with a speed not seen since the first fifteen minutes of Pixar’s Up, then brings you into the day when 12 alien ships arrive on Earth and then just hover there. Worldwide panic ensures as nobody can figure out if the aliens are here to make friends or destroy humanity.
Amy Adams plays linguistics professor Louise Banks. She’s recruited by the United States government to try and establish communications with the aliens, which speak an odd, guttural language and write in mysterious enso. Banks races to find out why the aliens are here, before other nations decide to shoot first, ask questions later, and trigger a war to end all wars in the doing.
Arrival spins around the central idea of language and communication — how do you talk with an alien species that not only looks different but thinks in a completely different way? How do you talk with other human beings who, just as frightened and confused as you are, refuse to talk back? How do you talk with the people around you, about great loss and love?
Fans of ‘hard’ sci-fi will geek out over the intricacies of language, but the movie isn’t all math without heart, and it’s all because of Amy Adams. She anchors the film with an emotional core and brings us deftly through from the movie’s beginning to its end.
And that’s where Arrival largely succeeds where Interstellar fell short. The movie is a slow, quiet burn that ultimately triumphs on the emotional well of a single person, without having to reach for grander fourth-dimensional theories to explain the mysteries of love.
A suggestion: If you decide to watch this movie, don’t read or watch anything more about it. Go into the theaters as fresh as you can — you’ll understand why after.
Alvin Soon / Former Deputy Editor
I like coffee and cameras, but not together.