Amy is out of this world in sci-fi tale with substance
losing her to an incurable disease. Then, we move — forward or back? — to a university lecture she is giving on Portuguese. The news comes in: 12 huge black shells, like a cross between a giant black banana and the Gherkin, have arrived all across the world and are floating just above the ground, with unknown intentions.
The army, in the form of Forest Whitaker, recruits Louise and physicist Ian Donnelly ( Jeremy Renner) to try to make contact with the aliens and interpret their language.
For every day, the shell opens and, at the end of a kind of alien birth tunnel, behind a bright screen of light, there they are: two of them, more or less giant squid or octopi (in fact, heptapods, which don’t exist here) with grainy elephant skin.
Their rumbling speech is unintelligible but Louise has the idea of trying written language — and, in squiddy ink, they produce complex circular signs which she begins to understand.
Wh i l e the a r mi e s o f t h e wo r l d are moving towards attack, Louise finally understands that it is their very language that they have come to give, because language determines thought.
Their language also transcends time, g iv i ng L oui s e a n i ns i g h t i nt o h e r own future. Compellingly made, this is science fiction of substance, which is promising for the forthcoming new Blade Runner — even if, in the end, it takes us back to our own earthbound hopes and sorrows.