Arrival

Giv­en that per­son­al trau­ma is the pre­vail­ing through­line of Denis Villeneuve’s film­mak­ing career so far, it’s no sur­prise to find Arrival anchored by a famil­iar nar­ra­tive motif. In this low-key sci­ence fic­tion para­ble, Amy Adams plays a lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor named Louise Banks who is enlist­ed by the US gov­ern­ment to estab­lish an open line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a mono­lith­ic space­ship which is hov­er­ing some­where over rur­al Montana.

Eleven iden­ti­cal ves­sels have popped up at seem­ing­ly ran­dom loca­tions around the globe, and as the world’s super­pow­ers clam­our to ascer­tain the aliens’ inten­tions, anoth­er more per­ti­nent cri­sis comes to the fore. After reach­ing out to these mys­te­ri­ous, hyper-intel­li­gent beings, it becomes clear that the most mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion she will make is with Jere­my Renner’s hunky physicist.

The sub­ject of first con­tact has long been the pre­serve of block­buster cin­e­ma – the answer to the ques­tion ​‘are we alone in the uni­verse?’ glee­ful­ly embell­ished by films in which extrater­res­tri­als are com­mon­ly por­trayed as a sin­is­ter threat to human­i­ty. Amid all the body-snatch­ing, land­mark-vapor­is­ing chaos, few direc­tors have ever stopped to con­sid­er what an alien inva­sion might look like at ground lev­el. How would it play out over the course of days, weeks, months; not in the media or in some top secret mil­i­tary facil­i­ty, but among ordi­nary peo­ple sud­den­ly thrust into an extra­or­di­nary situation?

Steven Spiel­berg and Robert Zemeck­is each approached some­thing more exis­ten­tial with Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind and Con­tact respec­tive­ly, yet where those films rev­elled in sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery and the thrill of the unknown, Arrival takes human agency at fatal­is­tic face val­ue. Cred­it to Vil­leneuve for offer­ing such a sophis­ti­cat­ed take on the genre, just don’t go in expect­ing Big Things from what is effec­tive­ly a Nicholas Sparks weepie with some space mon­sters thrown in.