ARRIVAL: It's About Time

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writer: Eric Heisserer
Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg
Runtime: 116 mins.
2016

Director Denis Villeneuve, a rising awards darling whose work consistently elevates the scripts that he chooses, specializes in atmosphere. Villeneuve's movies creep forward, slowing down the onscreen activity, forcing us to occupy the experience of his characters. In a feat of uncommon wizardry, Villeneuve's movies become increasingly riveting as the pacing slows. Arrival is not only the perfect movie to reap the benefits of Villeneuve's talents, but Eric Heisserer provides him with a screenplay that he need not elevate because it's exactly as good as he is.

After a series of impressionistic flashbacks establish the main character, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the film jumps straight to the point. Aliens have come to Earth in the form of twelve pitch black ovoid vessels that hover silently above twelve apparently unrelated parts of the world. Louise, being one of the planet's great linguistic minds, has been summoned by the American military, as embodied by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker). Her goal, a challenge that stretches across the entirety of the film's 116 minute runtime, is to learn how to communicate with the aliens well enough to pose the all-important question: Why have they come?

Arrival is such an atypical alien invasion movie that the closest point of comparison I can think of is 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, and even that is a bit of a stretch. Arrival deliberately positions itself as a deconstruction of alien invasion movies. Even as the extraterrestrials' murky intentions hang over the characters, Louise is so committed to peaceable communication that the real anxiety comes from how long the world leaders and military men are willing to wait before gambling on a preemptive strike. By the time we get to our first potentiality of violence it is sickening--the inverse of a movie like Independence Day. A good filmmaker can make violence exciting, but a great filmmaker can make it stomach-churning.

Arrival's generic subversion brings me to two counterfactuals. The first is, what if someone else had directed this movie? It would likely be worse, with mishandled tone and emphasis. The screenplay is so packed with intellectual jargon that it would be tempting to play it as a straight procedural, which would have been interesting but dull. Villeneuve's patience and ponderousness would have been lost, at which point Arrival would have just become a boring version of Interstellar.

My other counterfactual is as follows: What if Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) had been the main character instead of Louise? Since Hollywood is backwards and narrowminded, most movies would have opted for the male scientist as the active protagonist with the female linguist as his romantic accessory, rather than vice versa. Yet Ian does so little in Arrival that he didn't even warrant a mention in my plot recap. I don't think this is a blind spot in the screenplay. Rather, I think Ian's role is to be the hotshot scientist who immediately realizes that his lens of understanding is insufficient to breach the communication divide. Rather than be an obstructionist baby like so many men in positions of power, he immediately sets about being an ally to Louise in her more cultural approach. This is a commentary on the more complementary role science needs to take in intellectual discourse, as well as a critique of male egotism and individualism, all of this without speaking directly about either subject.

The movie is chock full of subtext and peripheral themes, while the text of the film has very little time for anything beyond working to solve the communication puzzle. This makes Arrival a film that lingers--chilly on the surface, but home to untappable depths that reward continued consideration.

Then the film's grand finale reveals itself, in which we are thrust into a transcendent, shockingly emotional experience that recontextualizes everything we've seen up until this point. The whole movie is transmogrified on the level of text, subtext, and theme. It could be called a twist in the traditional sense, but unlike most twists, it is what the film had been about the entire time. I mentioned Interstellar earlier. All due respect to Nolan, but what Interstellar attempted to accomplish by showing us the universe, Arrival achieves by limiting itself to three simple locations.

Of course, one of those locations is the inside the alien ship. Although the plot requires visits to the ship to become routine, we never quite lose the sense of eerie otherworldliness that is so masterfully constructed by the initial entry sequence. Everything about the production design--the smooth exterior, the antechamber, the transparent barrier, the heptapods, their inky written language--feels both entirely original and believably alien. Villeneuve's glacial camera captures it all with a steady gaze, drinking in the weirdness and always presenting it from a fresh perspective that keeps our attention. If you took Close Encounters of the Third Kind's Spielbergian wonder and gave it horse tranquilizers, you'd get Arrival.

Even if Arrival had remained a sci-fi procedural for its entire runtime, like a far more interesting version of The Martian, it would have been one of the year's best films. But the final fifteen minutes elevates it to one of the sci-fi greats of our century so far. So often third act reveals rob movies of their emotional integrity, but Arrival uses its ending to prove its emotional integrity, as well as its philosophical legitimacy and its desire to say something acutely relevant to the world today. Don't miss out on this one.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS