Have you ever found yourself trying to communicate with someone who didn’t share your language? How did you get your point across? What tools did you use to communicate? Now, imagine that process with your dog, or in Arrival’s case, an alien species. Denis Villeneuve’s movie not only explores this concept with fantastic insight, it throws in a fascinating story and an interesting character study, merging each section flawlessly.
After a heartbreaking prologue catching us up with Louise (Amy Adams), we hit the day where “they” arrive. 12 black orb ships arrive in random places across the Earth. Obviously, the militaries of each nation form a barrier around the ships, and they recruit Amy Adams, the world’s best linguist, to try to interpret what the aliens are here to do. Amy Adams attempts to communicate with aliens surrounded by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), Agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the military plus Ian (Jeremy Renner), one of the best scientists in the United States. Their task is near impossible: they have to create a language translation of the alien communication, discern the extra terrestrial’s motives, coordinate efforts with all the nations of the world, and do it quickly before the military (especially China’s leader) misinterprets a quote and preemptively attacks or people of the countries provoke a conflict.
Arrival will go down as one of the most realistic depictions of how humanity would handle an alien race coming to earth since The Day the Earth Stood Still. Villeneuve probably used historical evidence to extrapolate on a global scale how the communication would go down. The minutia of how to build a connection is fascinating: the breakdown of what a sentence communicates, the slow creation of words and sentences, how technology fits into the process: each piece appears well researched and provides credibility and a strong backbone to Eric Heisserer’s screenplay. In addition, history has also taught the writers that factors from within humanity itself would be as big (if not a bigger) threat than the “arrived” others. First thing the military will do is take over the investigation and shroud it in secrecy. For the next domino, fear mongers with a media platform will scare people who lack perspective and are afraid of the secrecy, potentially causing riots and misinformation to spread. From there, the military will usually respond with force, and the cycle of blaming the other will escalate. We see this all through history: Native Americans, 1930’s Germany, today’s Islamaphobia, etc; it’s the oldest trick in the book, but humanity over and over executes the same pattern when a foreign entity arrives to threaten the established power structure. Arrival adds the additional wrinkle of every culture on Earth trying to work together, meaning humanity takes precedent over culture, which may be too big an ask for a diverse planet of different cultures. How America may interpret a saying would be wildly different from China, and the uneasy alliance between these groups gives Arrival compelling and relevant subplots around the already captivating central story.
But Arrival knows that it cannot just be a heartless procedural about talking to aliens. The movie parallel’s the struggle to communicate with aliens with Louise’s personal struggles. Via a great Amy Adams, Louise, the master communicator, has had great difficulty in her life with that subject for all sorts of reasons. These struggles had left Louise essentially robotic in her interactions with people, that is, until she meets Ian. Those two then parallel the joy of breakthroughs in connecting with another person or being. Louise’s reentrance to the world at large provides the emotional punch to deliver the revelations in the third act. Obviously, there are going to be revelations, but I can’t remember a movie since Inception where I was as surprised and impressed with where a story ended up going. Arrival requires intellectual investment, for sure, but that investment is paid off tenfold with its big revelations in the third act. It’s rare that a movie can be emotionally and twistily rewarding, but this gem of a movie sticks its landing.
Arrival caught me completely by surprise, like the alien landing jump starting the movie. This movie fires on all cylinders, weaving emotional, dramatic, thriller, and mystery elements together seamlessly. Arrival just wants us to try to communicate with each other, and have a little faith, and I’m glad I gave in to it, because it makes me a better person for having connected with it.