Review: Arrival

The arrival of the title comes in the form of alien vessels, twelve in total, that have suspended themselves in countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, and the United States. Immense in height - 1500 feet tall, to be exact - and resembling a roughly polished boulder, they hover silently, perhaps harmlessly, perhaps in preparation. But who are they, where do they come from, what do they want?

These are the questions tasked to Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker). Ian is a theoretical physicist, an affable wonk, but that's the extent of his back story. Louise, on the other hand, is given more complication. The film's opening prelude compresses her daughter's lifetime into mere minutes - she was born, she was loved, she died too soon - and an aura of mourning haloes Louise. "Come back to me," are her first words to her newborn daughter, and the arrival following her loss suggests that purpose, if not her daughter, is about to be restored to Louise.

Louise is a linguist and, in one of the film's almost infinite number of striking images, is spirited away in the middle of the night in a military copter to be taken to Montana where one of the alien ovoids is located. Director Denis Villeneuve, as is his wont, has offered glimpses here and there of these mysterious crafts but, as the copter approaches the site, he bestows upon us a full and uninterrupted view of the monolith framed by verdant prairies and waves of fog bellying around it.

The wonder continues... Louise, Ian, and a small crew enter the vessel and it is revealed that gravity is an earthly concept. Inside the antechamber, they walk upside down and sideways, approaching a glass barrier that houses two of the alien visitors. The aliens, later dubbed heptapods, float in an oceanic mist and bear more than a passing resemblance to disembodied hands. Bony and tentacular, they splay their hands open like starfish, communicating by squirting a black liquid that swirls into calligraphic circles for Louise to decipher. Much of the film is devoted to the daily sessions Louise conducts with these two heptapods and the thrill is in witnessing both parties trying to decode each other's language but also in Louise striving to clarify the intent of the heptapods' inky declarations.

Language is pregnant with possibilities but so is time, and Eric Heisserer's adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story, "The Story of Your Life," unfolds the palindromic narrative ever so subtly. Events are not precisely what they seem, and words are wielded as weapons as much as they are used to bridge distances. Breaking down and reconfiguration - of thought, language, reality throb throughout the film - the very act of thinking is shown to be as taut and ductile as any set piece in an action film.

The two heptapods are dubbed Abbott and Costello, but they may have easily been named Stanley and Andrei, so strongly do the spirits of Kubrick and Tarkovsky vibrate in Arrival. Patience is essential when viewing any film by Villeneuve, whose execution is consistently deliberate and measured, spare and elegant, and emotionally dense. The film is strangely, stirringly, solemnly symphonic - all its individual elements harmoniously coalescing from Johan Johansson's majestically sarcophagic score to Bradford Young's resplendently evocative camerawork to Adams' supremely receptive performance.

Arrival is a beautiful and thought-provoking piece of work, but the inherent problem with most films of this ilk that revolve around discovery of the Other is that what is anticipated is often less tantalising than the act of anticipation itself. The first two-thirds of the film are mesmerising, the last third less so as it begins to wholly connect the dots and dip into some cringeworthy dialogue. Thankfully, the weakness of the final act doesn't impact the overall quality of the film. Arrival is riveting science fiction that draws its power from its intelligence and humanity.

Arrival

Directed by: Denis Villeneuve

Written by: Eric Heisserer; based on the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang

Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, Mark O'Brien