Deciphering the hidden truths
Seeking to cross a cosmic divide, Arrival’s tone is one of discovery
How fitting it is that the squidlike visitors of Denis Villeneuve’s reflective and aweinspiring Arrival bring with them their own viewing screen, like an interplanetary movie road show.
These are the most gawk-worthy space aliens since E.T. sought to phone home, a tribute to special effects that, for once, are truly special.
Known as “heptapods,” they’re a gaggle of sinewy limbs that slither before our astonished eyes and also those of Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguistics expert tasked with attempting to communicate and decipher intent.
Are they here to watch and be watched, or are their plans sinister? The heptapods have their own multi-layered language, which they splash in black ink across the screen like budding Jackson Pollock imitators, inviting — perhaps daring? — onlookers to parse their meaning.
As with Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, the cerebral novella that Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapt with intelligence and grace, Arrival is far from your standard sci-fi movie, although dramatic necessity requires some third-act pugnacity on the part of the earthlings.
This is a movie that quests for connection on the nature of being, no matter where you call home. Banks is also seeking personal definition: she’s a mother mourning her daughter, felled by terminal illness, whom flashbacks reveal as a presence almost as enigmatic as the heptapods.
Does Banks somehow feel culpable? Or does she just feel lost? She’s reminiscent of the seeking and conflicted female protagonists of two earlier Villeneuve films,
Incendies and Sicario, all of them guided by a director with a keen appreciation of film’s ability to get at hidden truths.
He’s also more than willing to overturn gender stereotypes. Banks is the motivating force in the movie, although she’s flanked by bossy males: Forest Whitaker’s blunt-spoken Colonel Weber, the army intelligence man who summons her to action; and Jeremy Renner’s Ian Donnelly, a bemused Los Alamos scientist who assists her and who might have been written as the hero figure in a lesser screenplay.
They all gape in wonder at what’s happening behind the glowing screens inside the giant stretched oval spacecraft of the aliens.
It’s made all the more mysterious by Johann Johannsson’s ethereal score and Bradford Young’s misty cinematography.
The spacecraft hover just above the ground at apparently random locations, remote pastures and bustling cities, as majestic as they are threatening.
Did someone say threatening? It’s almost a disappointment when Arrival yields to sci-fi conventions and panicky world leaders — Chinese and Russian ones get the blame this time — do what panicky world leaders always do.
But this inevitability can’t dim the movie’s mood of discovery and of seeking to cross a cosmic divide.
It’s something that seems all the more meaningful in the week of a U.S. election where conflicting voices were loudly heard, but nobody is really sure what was being said.