First Contact: ARRIVAL

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 cliché 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.

Part of Darkness: LIGHTS OUT

Lights Out has a pretty scary image and takes it about as far as it can go. Then it keeps going, stretching itself thin before collapsing into end credits. The idea is this: a mean, grabby, violent ghost is lurking in the dark, and disappears in the light. The opening sequence is effective, as two characters at the end of a long workday are locking up a mannequin warehouse (red flag number one, for all the shadowy figures lurking in the frame). When the lights go out, a haunting silhouette appears in the doorway, backlit by other rooms’ ambient glow. They flip the switch. Nothing’s there. Flip it again. There’s the ghost again, getting closer. Spooky stuff. Unfortunately, that’s really the only trick up the movie’s sleeve, although screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Final Destination 5) tries, but only sometimes succeeds, to keep the deployment of the image fresh throughout. The problem is inherent in making a 3-minute short into a feature-length affair, running out of novelty far sooner than an 80-minute horror movie should.

But at least director David F. Sandberg, adapting his own short, is trying, investing the thin story with something like psychological interest. One should never attend a horror movie expecting a sensitive treatment of mental illness. But here it makes for an interesting thread right up until the genre dictates send it straight into troubling conclusions. That makes it more disappointing in the end, but, hey, it was worth a try. It turns out the ghost who appears when the lights go out – one with a prerequisite tortured-youngster-in-a-tragic-asylum backstory – is psychically linked to a mother (Maria Bello) gone off her meds. The supernatural creature is a manifestation of her breakdown. We learn it happened before, after her first husband disappeared when her now-grown daughter (Teresa Palmer) was 10 years old. She managed to get it under control then. But now, after the death of her second husband (Billy Burke), it’s back, conjoined with her depression and other nameless psychological issues going untreated welcoming this specter into the home she shares with her young son (Gabriel Bateman).

What’s fascinating underneath the pro forma ghost story elements is the understanding of the ways one person’s psychosis can become a shared state of madness for the whole family. They’re bound together inside the delusion, if not in sharing the particulars then at least in understanding the language of its parameters. When the boy turns up at his step-sister’s apartment, exhausted from sleepless nights hiding as the thing goes bump in the dark, she knows all too well what’s wrong. It doesn’t take long until she and her boyfriend (Alexander DiPersia) argue with the mother about what’s best for the boy, and ultimately decide to help rid their family of this terrible curse with or without her help. The mother’s pills have gone untaken, and the ghost is getting territorial, trying its best to scare off or, failing that, kill anyone who would stop this woman’s mental illness, and thus stop allowing the spirit’s malevolence to exist.

That’s a neat-enough way to pad out the runtime. As it goes along the ghost appears and disappears under the dim glow of all of the lights (all of the lights): cop lights, flash lights, spotlights, strobe lights, street lights, candlelight, black light, neon light. All of the lights. You get the picture. There’s scraping and growling and lunging, often circling in the surround speakers to give an immersive sense of creepiness until the being appears with a jolt, its outline darkening the edges of a pale beam, then shrinking in a strong blast of bright. It’s clever, especially when the ghost starts picking objects or people up and then, upon disappearing, drops them instantaneously. But the filmmakers don’t play with the concept enough, eventually devolving into the sort of dumb horror movie behavior (don’t open that! don’t split up! don’t turn your back on that! don’t leave him alone! don’t go in the basement!) that contributes to diminishing the scares’ potency.

Still, it’s enjoyably surfacy and small enough to nearly work, carried along by well-lit (naturally) frames and a cast committing to the emotional intensity of children watching their mother’s vulnerable state deteriorate. Both are enhanced in spookiness by all those opportunities for characters to look scared while holding light sources under their faces like they’re telling ghost stories around the campfire. But by the end, the movie itself doesn’t seem to know how to conclude, arriving at a truly dispiriting answer to its characters’ problems. It gives up. The method by which the threat is resolved implies that mental illness of a certain severity is essentially incurable, and that the sane members of the family would be better off without her. That’s reductive and insulting, probably not on purpose, but through an inability to figure out any other way to write themselves to a satisfying stopping point. In just about every possible aspect, Lights Out starts intriguing and then runs out of bright ideas well before its end.

More Finals: FINAL DESTINATION 5

The biggest problem with the last couple Final Destination movies is that the audience starts the film way ahead of the characters. Since rare is the survivor in one of these cinematic death traps, we know all the rules and are forced to wait around for the new batch of characters to catch up to where we are. Each film starts with gathering a group of characters and then killing them all off in an over-the-top calamity. Then it circles back to reveal that the accident has yet to occur. What we’ve seen is merely a premonition that was just experienced by our main character. Said main character then saves some of the group seconds before the disaster occurs, but rather than saving their lives he’s brought them into a new kind of prolonged torture. Since they were all marked to die, Death itself, the ever-present invisible menace, is out to hunt down all of these escapees one by one.

I have a tremendous affection for this series. The first three are especially efficient and are probably the very best examples of the premise that could possibly be made, imbued with a gutsy B-movie sensibility paired with a devilish delight in methodically setting up the variables that, when triggered in just the wrong, or right, order will lead to a freak accident. They’re slasher movies without the villain. When you get right down to it, it’s far more unsettling for me to contemplate death by weird, complicated, unforeseeable circumstances than it is to simply ponder meeting a masked machete-man in the woods. The former is simply much more likely than the latter. These films succeed through their total commitment to the innovation and imagination (not to mention the incineration, impalement, and other sudden bloody frights) inherent in the concept.

By the time we arrived at the fourth feature in the series it was all starting to seem a little tired but here we are yet again, this time with Final Destination 5. It dials back some of the flippancy that began to settle in last time, occasionally summoning up the dread and propulsion that made the first three so much creepy fun. The recipient of the premonition this time is Nicholas D’Agasto, who wears the responsibility well. As for a group of his co-workers headed to a retreat that are saved by his early warning of a bridge collapse, they’re less memorable than they should be. The boss (David Koechner), the I.T. guy (P.J. Byrne), the intern (Emma Bell) and various office workers (Miles Fisher, Ellen Wroe, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, and Arlen Escarpeta) are just plain less interesting than other ensembles and that makes the time spent waiting for the characters to learn why they survived, only to start mysteriously dying, a bit on the tedious side. (I do like how, as in all these movies, several character names are winks to horror icons of the past, this time including Friedkin, Hooper, and Castle).

As the characters line up to meet their grisly ends, the film, directed by Steven Quale from a script by Eric Heisserer, makes good use of its 3D technology, finding great ways to accent depth and heights but then still getting a kick out of thrusting bloody entrails and goop right at you. The way the plot unfolds feels a bit more belabored than usual. “You know how many things had to go wrong for this to happen?” a detective asks after a laser-eye surgery patient suffers through several steps of equipment malfunctions. It’s unsettling to a certain extent, and certainly gross, but lacks a real visceral impact like even an earlier sequence in this very movie that finds cringing suspense from the threat of unnatural bodily harm from gymnastics gone wrong. (I knew there was a good reason I find it difficult to watch uneven bars routines).

Learning about the franchise’s rules comes courtesy of the series’ one major semi-recurring supporting actor, Tony Todd as an eerie coroner. Asked how he knows so much, he responds “I’ve seen it all before.” And so we have. This one has a handful of good moments and ends on a terrific nod to the franchise’s past on top of a well-executed climax. The film goes through the events you’d expect, hits all the beats the other films have conditioned us to foresee.