Review

Arrival review: dazzling science-fiction that will leave you speechless

Amy Adams in Arrival
Amy Adams in Arrival


Director: Denis Villeneuve; Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma. Cert 12A, 116 mins.

The dozen alien vessels in Arrival – stormcloud black, prolate hemispheroids the size of upended airports – aren’t easy to miss. But for sheer neck-craning scale, the film’s ideas and ambitions match them inch for inch. The magnificent new film from Denis Villeneuve is the kind of science fiction picture that hands its audience rocket packs, then goes arcing off into the heavens and dares you to keep up.

It is introspective, philosophical and existentially inclined – yet unfolds in an unwavering tenor of chest-tightening excitement. And there is a mid-film revelation – less a sudden twist than sleek unwinding of everything you think you know – that feels, when it hits you, like your seat is tipping back. 

At its essence, Arrival is an alien invasion film with the invasion on pause. The ships appear above seemingly randomly selected points around the globe – then just hang there, like mile-high question marks. That’s why the US military enlists Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), an expert linguist, to travel to one such landing site in rural Montana: they need someone who can firstly work out how to ask the aliens why they’re here, and secondly, can understand the answer. Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) plays her a recording in her study that sounds like the subaquatic creaking of a shipwreck. 

Louise’s response – commingling flickers of fear and intellectual curiosity, followed by a half-swallowed question (“Did they have…mouths?”) sets the tone precisely and thrillingly for what’s ahead. So for that matter does the gaunt, frost-stung score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who also soundtracked Villeneuve’s drug-cartel thriller Sicario. As Louise’s helicopter first approaches the ship over a carpet of pouring mist, we hear a flesh-prickling bass note (think piano wire tickled by a feather) and a half-sung, half-blown melody line that seems to exist outside of any earthly time signature.

Amy Adams
Amy Adams

Adams is one of the best actresses Hollywood has, though few who first felt the glow of her full-beam charisma in Enchanted or The Muppets could have foreseen the supreme subtlety and screwed-down focus of her work here. Villeneuve’s superb cinematographer, Bradford Young (Selma, A Most Violent Year), lingers on Adams’ face, because Arrival is a film that values the human reaction to something eerie or wondrous as much as the eeriness or wondrousness itself. 

When Louise and her theoretical physicist colleague Ian Donnelly (a twinkly, affable Jeremy Renner) confront the aliens in a tomb-like antechamber, what takes away your breath are their human faces, lit up with horror and wonder, framed by their orange radiation suits and the blackness behind.

To say much about the aliens themselves, which the Earthlings soon name heptapods, would lessen the fun of meeting them unbriefed. But they’re a triumph of creepily memorable design, as is their written language, which looks at first like coffee mug rings but gradually takes on the daunting beauty of intricate calligraphy.

That language turns out to be central to the aliens’ purpose on Earth, which puts Louise in a pivotal position in the outreach effort – though as she gleans more knowledge about how the aliens write (and therefore think), inter-human communication between the US landing site and others around the world, in places like Russia, China and Pakistan, disintegrates. The film was shot in the summer of 2015, but its depiction of a world unwilling to communicate – and conception of communication itself as something that can be withheld, like trade sanctions – feels soul-stompingly relevant.

For that, thank Eric Heisserer, who adapted Arrival from a Ted Chiang short story called Story of Your Life. His screenplay is a netless-trapeze-level feat of writerly ingenuity. Chiang’s original piece was intelligent and wildly gripping to start with, but it’s also entirely uncinematic – and its "twist", for want of a better word, seems to defy visualisation. 

Jeremy Renner in Arrival
Jeremy Renner in Arrival

Arrival pulls it off by subtly, dazzlingly, making us reevaluate how we read films in the first place – what are the melancholic prologue and flashback scenes really telling us? – much as Louise herself has to break down and reform the links between language, reality and thought. 

This sets Arrival a lot closer to Contact, Robert Zemeckis’s underrated existential star- and soul-gaze from 1997, than, say, Christopher Nolan’s very differently ambitious Interstellar – and light-years apart from Independence Day and the fist-pumping like. But in any language, human or otherwise, it will leave you speechless.

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