Like all the best science fiction, Arrival uses heady ideas to illuminate humanity. In the movie,
large black pods descend upon the Earth, hovering ominously above twelve,
seemingly random, spots on the globe. We don’t know what they want. Armies
mobilize. News media chatters endlessly about our anxiety. And with a grim,
secret determination, small bands of researchers try to figure out a way to
communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Their silence is scary. But
science just might find a way. We follow one of those teams, a linguist (Amy
Adams) and a physicist (Jeremy Renner) recruited by a colonel (Forest Whitaker)
to helicopter into the base around the UFO in the wilds of Montana. The object
opens every 18 hours, a passageway into which they can climb and attempt to
learn the aliens’ language. The mysterious beings hide behind a clear wall,
spindly, spidery grey giants in milky off-white fog, uttering their inscrutable
otherworldly tones. How we react to them, how we attempt to understand them, will
determine the fate of the world. Is that kind of emotional intelligence, that
drive to cooperate and understand, within the powers of the human race? After
all, it’s so much easier to give into the fear of the unknown, to scapegoat, to
shoot first and ask questions never.
Alien visitation narratives can take many forms: the campy,
the exciting, the funny, the metaphorical, the ponderous. Director Denis
Villeneuve, whose films like Prisoners
and Sicario are pulp procedurals told
with heavy deliberateness, treats Arrival
with great seriousness. Austere, carefully composed images captured by
cinematographer Bradford Young tell the story with patience, watching competent
people doing their jobs in extraordinary circumstances. Maybe one of the most
poignant effects of watching the military and scientists quickly get over their
bewilderment and get down to the business of figuring out what to do next
step-by-step is its fantasy of competency when faced with unprecedented events.
Remember thinking our political and intellectual leaders could withstand such a
test? But the movie isn’t safe fantasy. It interrogates the impulses with which
mankind would greet such a moment. Some countries send researchers of their own
into the UFOs nearest them, eager to share research with colleagues at other
sites. Some countries lock down, militarize, and greet news of others’
discoveries with suspicion. One wrong move could bring unknowable consequences.
Will one bad faith act wreck the planet for us all?
Villeneuve, working in the shadow of 2001 and Close Encounters of
the Third Kind and Contact, in
which scientific process is diligently portrayed until leaping into pure poetry
at the point of its most beautiful conjectures, imagines the events with cautiousness
and precision. If this were to happen, this might be how it’d go down. There’s
a tick-tock element of professionalism to the researcher’s routines. We see
them pouring over data and fitfully sleeping before it’s time to go into the
UFO again, hands shaking as they attempt new techniques of communication. The
progress is slow. The stakes are high. Everyone moves as if in a daze,
determined to get it right, too overwhelmed to register how mind-bending and
world changing their position is. Villeneuve, so good at conjuring dread and
awe, uses every ounce of his ability to give these events their full weight. We
stare up at the massive edifice of the object, stare in wonder at its enormity,
its unusual construction. It dwarfs the actors who move up into it. Clouds roll
by. Below, the humans wait for its next move, if it will ever come. It’s a
beautiful and terrifying unknown.
The impeccable craftsmanship of the film gives it its
unshakeable mood, and its dizzying intensity. With a story like this one, equal
parts mystery and reverence for what other filmmakers could’ve easily turned
silly, tone is crucial. By maintaining tight control over the soft light and
somber soundtrack, the eerie alien creaking and clunking and crisp man-made
tools clicking and clacking, Villeneuve keeps the proceedings compelling in
their stillness, their intellectual puzzling, and slowly accumulating power. The
film begins with the story of Amy Adams’ linguist losing a loved one (earning
weeping faster than any film since Up),
associating the earthshaking discovery with death, grief and fear mingling as
one melancholy unknown. This backstory is shuffled into the background as the
film gets down to business, informing the emotional terrain subtextually. But
as it bubbles back up, the film reveals its full intentions, melding a massive
coldness with subtle warmth, tenderness invading the foreboding.
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s reverent expansion of the
short story by Ted Chiang – one of our greatest sci-fi authors – faithfully
recreates the full, breathtaking, head-spinning melding of real emotion and
speculative fact. How fulfilling it is to be confronted with big budget sci-fi
spectacle that actually grows more complicated and confounding as it goes
along. So often these things start with provocative questions then funnel into
a routine battle or clichĂ© confrontation. Here, it’s a what-if scenario played
out with respect for its characters’ weary commitment to facts and faith in the
power of process. They aren’t gilded with subplots about interpersonal conflict.
Instead, they have a job to do, and the plot is studded with smart suppositions
and clever obstacles: an uncooperative foreign military, a soldier quietly
radicalized by right-wing conspiracy websites, the adverse effects of little
sleep and lots of stress. It asks a familiar question – what is one fleeting
human life in the fullness of time and space? – in a gripping intellectual
thought experiment procedural, and finds in the end not a puzzle-solving
solution, but beautifully poetic answers in a way only this genre could find.
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