Summary

Arrival
is a bold, smart, and emotionally resonant science fiction film that delves into human behavior and the mystery of alien visitors.
The film uses language as a crucial element in solving the alien mystery, with Amy Adams delivering a powerful performance as linguist Louise Banks.
Director Denis Villeneuve’s visually stunning and emotionally impactful work in
Arrival
marks it as a singular achievement in his career.

Denis Villeneuve has directed some of the best science fiction films of the past decade, beginning with the 2016 science fiction drama film Arrival, which established Villeneuve as a master visual storyteller whose boundless imagination and flair for spectacle is complemented by his ability to infuse his films with strong emotional punch. Like all great science fiction films, Arrival takes a deep breath and then plunges into the great unknown, which is represented by the image of 12 unidentified flying objects hovering over various locations around the Earth. Arrival stars Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a linguistics expert who, on the day that said flying objects enter Earth’s orbit, is recruited by the United States military to study a spacecraft that hovers over Montana.

Arrival is a bold, smart, and sophisticated science fiction film that asks big questions that combine universal human feelings with the central mystery of why the aliens have decided to visit Earth. Like the similarly ambitious and involving science fiction films Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian, Arrival is more interested in human behavior than space travel and special effects.

Arrival Speaks a Different Language
Arrival Release Date November 10, 2016 Runtime 116

In Arrival, language serves as the basis for how Earth attempts to communicate with the seven-limbed aliens, referred to as Heptapods by linguist Louise Banks and her most immediate colleague, physicist Ian Donnelly, played by Jeremy Renner. After boarding the Montana spacecraft and making contact with two Heptapods, Banks and Donnelly face the awesome challenge of attempting to decipher messages given to them by the aliens and then sharing these messages with the rest of the world’s nations. Some of these nations, especially China, are prepared to attack the aliens at the slightest indication of an alien attack.

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As a worldwide state of panic takes hold, communication and language become the key elements in solving this mystery, and Banks seeks the answer to a fundamental question: What are you doing here? However, as Louise gets closer to being able to present this crucial question in an understandable way, the process of learning the alien language alters Louise’s linear perception of time. The result of this is that Louise has premonitions, which are helpful in terms of resolving the alien crisis but also have the effect of making her grieve the death of her daughter, who is revealed to have died at the age of 12 in the film’s opening scene before this tragedy occurs in linear time.

Louise Banks’ Amazing Journey in Arrival

The fact that Arrival is able to achieve an effective balance between its emotional and thriller elements is a testament to Denis Villeneuve’s careful, expert direction and also Amy Adams’ powerful performance as linguist Louise Banks, whose personal journey emerges as the film’s central focus, as Louise becomes Earth’s primary interpreter between the alien visitors and humanity.

Because of its heightened focus on Louise’s journey, Arrival, based on the acclaimed 1998 novella “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, never devolves into becoming a cold and distant science fiction exercise. Introduced as a brilliant but emotionally isolated linguist on the day Earth is transformed forever, Louise undergoes dramatic changes throughout the film, in which the universal feelings of grief, love, and sadness that she brings to her mission are directly connected to the vital questions in the movie regarding how we approach our fear of the unknown, the importance of communicating through language instead of action, and especially what makes life worth living.

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However, Louise pays a horrific personal price for serving as a bridge between the aliens and humanity. While the premonitions that she receives of future events enable her to avert a global disaster, these premonitions also foretell her future darkness, which forces her and the audience to contemplate their life choices and whether they will make different choices when given the ability to visualize the entirety of their lives. Louise’s response to this dilemma provides the film’s emotional payoff and makes Arrival seem even more fascinating and powerful in retrospect.

Arrival Is a Visual Epic with Heart

Of the few criticisms that Denis Villeneuve has received throughout his celebrated career, Villeneuve, like many science fiction directors, has sometimes been criticized for allowing his breathtaking visuals to overwhelm the human dimensions of his films. However, while Arrival is a dazzling technical and visual achievement, the film, considered one of the best films of the past decade, contains more emotional resonance than any other film in Villeneuve’s career.

The utter commitment and integrity that Villeneuve and Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer displayed in faithfully translating the philosophical and spiritual elements from the haunting source material is evidenced by the film’s relatively muted box-office performance. While Arrival was certainly a box-office success, with a worldwide box-office gross of just over $200 million against a relatively modest production cost of $47 million, it wasn’t nearly as successful as the science fiction films Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian, each of which grossed over $630 million at the worldwide box office between 2013 and 2015.

However, the kind of film that Arrival would have had to become to achieve that level of popularity is clearly the kind of film that Villeneuve and his collaborators had no interest in making. Moreover, even compared to Villeneuve’s triumphant Dune film series, Arrival, which received eight Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director nomination for Villeneuve, represents a singular achievement in his career. Villeneuve has never directed a film that reverberates as strongly as Arrival. Arrival is streaming on Paramount+.