For all our preoccupation with space travel and intergalactic showdowns, it’s remarkable how few science-fiction movies we make. You can’t swing a dead extraterrestrial at a multiplex these days without getting it stuck in someone’s interdimensional portal. But many of the ostensibly sci-fi flicks that have proved so appealing lately are more at home in the fantasy genre, leaving the true business of science fiction—considering how our lives and our world might be affected by technological advancements or new discoveries—feeling a bit underserved by mainstream movies.
Arrival, then, couldn’t have come at a better time. The new first-contact yarn from eminently reliable Québécois director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario) lives up to its genre’s implied demand for visual spectacle, thanks to some bravura production design and eerily beautiful cinematography. But it’s even more determined to answer some of science fiction’s higher callings. It’s a cerebral and moving thriller about the transformative powers of communication and empathy, and it reminds us that exploration and discovery aren’t purely physical endeavors.
On the surface, Arrival concerns itself with one of the most practical problems of alien contact: How would we even begin to communicate with beings so far removed from our own experience? Right off the bat, it gets something right—its aliens, usually seen drifting through ethereal fog behind an impenetrable barrier, are utterly, well, alien. We have no idea how to talk to them or discern the reason for the overnight appearance of a dozen monolithic vessels around the globe. The creatures, who receive human visitors into their ships every 18 hours, seem to be making an attempt at verbal communication, but their grunts and moans are indecipherable.
Enter Louise Banks and Ian Donnelly (Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, respectively), a linguist and a physicist who are charged with devising some method of communication with the aliens. When we meet Louise during the film’s tear-jerking opening montage, she’s reeling from the death of her teenage daughter. In a voice-over, Louise tells us that she’s not sure she still believes in beginnings and endings. Her statement feels portentous, but its impact on the film’s narrative won’t become clear until the final act—long after Louise has been pressed into service as an interspecies interpreter.
The U.S. government, represented by the dutiful Col. Weber (Forest Whittaker) and the eternally suspicious Agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), wants Louise and Ian to ask the visitors a simple question: What is their purpose on Earth? But with zero shared experience or points of reference, even such a simple interrogation is a monumental undertaking that requires months of painstaking groundwork. How do we know if the aliens differentiate between collective and personal pronouns? Will they even understand what a question is?
For Louise and Ian, armed only with whiteboards and dry-erase markers, first contact is a joyful scientific endeavor—they take pure delight in every word they teach or learn from the giant squid-knuckle creatures they playfully name “Abbott” and “Costello.” But the military and government types calling the shots have a predictably darker view of the interactions. There’s a loudly ticking clock looming over the proceedings—China is getting jittery and appears to be making arrangements for first-strike military actions against their local craft, prompting other countries to follow suit. Again, communication is the key; as each nation’s officials begin to horde the information gleaned from the visitors, their counterparts around the world are forced to make decisions based on increasingly incomplete data.
In the end, Arrival isn’t quite willing to commit to the heady ambition of its first half. Just when some of us are leaning forward in our seats and thinking, “Yes! Tell me more about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity!” it pulls back on the reins and gives itself over to a more mundane scientists-versus-the-military storyline. But it’s a relatively minor misstep in a movie that tackles bold ideas about science and language and genuinely cares for its characters.
Though Arrival certainly stands on its own, it seems important to mention the source material: “Story of Your Life,” a 1998 short story by Ted Chiang. It’s an impressive piece of fiction that uses past, present, and future tenses to weave its story about the relationship between linguistics and quantum science, and one of Arrival’s neatest tricks is that Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer manipulate the language of cinema in a similar way—when the movie’s biggest narrative twist is finally revealed, we realize it was never hidden in the first place.
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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