Amy Adams stars in the new sci-fi film, Arrival.
Arrival
Cert: 12A. Now showing
The signs were always there that Denis Villeneuve was something special. It was visible long before last year’s exceptional cartel thriller Sicario and its badlands dread. Prisoners and Enemy bookended 2013 for the French-Canadian, each imbued with their own brand of shape-shifting chills, and, like Sicario, a visual palette that was arresting.
But even before that, with 2010’s Incendies, Villeneuve displayed exactly why he could go on to become one of the greatest film-makers working in Hollywood today — his bold, canny compass when it comes to uncharted waters.
Sci-fi thus always seemed like a place Villeneuve would thrive, and Arrival confirms this.
Without a vast budget (a paltry $50m) or a single laser gun or explosion, he has crafted Ted Chiang’s award-winning short story into a unique alien-visit saga fuelled by seismic human energies and sensations usually rare to the genre.
Amy Adams is Louise Banks, a university linguist drafted in by Forest Whitaker’s colonel after huge, ear-shaped spaceships appear dotted randomly around Earth. She and maths whizz Ian (Jeremy Renner) are sent to have a close encounter with the visitors who seem to wish to communicate. While tasked with trying to decode their messages, she begins having vivid flashbacks and dreams. The more she understands, the more heightened the cognitive effects of the mental images. Meanwhile, paranoid governments train guns and society panics.
Stealthy signals, unforgettable moments and Johann Johannsson’s score coalesce magnificently as an iconic classic of sci-fi cinema, something to cherish for life, is created before your eyes. HILARY A WHITE