Arrival
Though part of a long tradition of aliens-arriving-on-earth
in literature and film, Arrival offers the viewer a different kind of
experience. It’s indebted to The War of the Worlds, The Day the
Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact,
among other works, but the way it imagines humans interacting with aliens for
the first time is uniquely its own. Neither an action film nor a
thriller, though containing elements of both, it’s more like an elegant
psychological mystery, unfolding in the languorous and indirect style of a
European art film. Think It Came from Outer Space meets Last
Year in Marienbad and you’ll get a sense of how this film looks and feels.
Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a professor of languages who has
done translations for the U.S. military in the past, is called back into action
when her skills are needed to make contact with the inhabitants of a flotilla
of mysterious spacecraft that have appeared suddenly in the skies over Earth.
Banks is reluctant at first; she’s a dedicated teacher but lives a
reclusive life, haunted by visions of a daughter lost to cancer in early
adulthood. Soon, however, she realizes this is the opportunity of a
lifetime, something linguists only dream of, and agrees to join the effort.
She’s whisked away by helicopter to a remote location in Montana where a team of military personnel
and language specialists have established a station monitoring one of the
spacecraft. Similar operations have been set up at various points around
the globe where other ships are located. Accompanying Banks is Ian
Connelly (Jeremy Renner), a self-assured theoretical physicist who is skeptical of linguistics’ usefulness for
the task, and Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), the grimly determined commander of
the team.
Nothing Banks or the others have experienced in their lives
could prepare them for the shock of meeting life forms as different as the ones
that live on the spacecraft. Bradford Young’s stunning camera work conveys
the physical discomfort, disorientation, astonishment, and ultimate sublimity
of the experience in imagery at once gritty and hallucinatory. Too much
for some, the arduous task of communicating with beings who use a language of
ornate visual symbols instead of sound is almost intuitive for Banks, who
quickly becomes lead translator for the entire project. In the close
confines of the alien ship, separated by a transparent wall, she watches the
octopus-like creatures spew out inky swirls from the ends of their limbs into
ornate circular patterns suspended before the eyes of their
mesmerized audience. Gradually,
Banks begins to learn how to read this unique script. At night she
experiences dreams and visions that lead her from one breakthrough in
understanding to another. The separation between her inner life and
the outside world of the aliens begins to dissolve, and insight floods in. And along with it, empathy.
At the
same time, Connelly’s initial resistance begins to dissolve as well and he
becomes an enthusiastic supporter of Banks’ methods, standing up for her
against pushback she receives from Weber and a suspicious intelligence agent (the
terrific Michael Stuhlbarg, wasted here in a bloodless role) whose presence reveals
the shadowy side of the government’s interest.
As trust and feeling grow between Banks and Connelly, it erodes
everywhere else, and mounting tensions between the various countries racing to
decipher the aliens’ cryptograms lead to suspicions of their ultimate
intentions for Earth. Over Banks’s
protests, the military takes a more aggressive stance, forcing her to choose
between the present crisis and the future she has glimpsed in her visions, a reality
she has come to fervently believe in.
Though philosophically oriented, Arrival is careful not to neglect basic genre thrills. Director Denis Villeneuve and his team have
accomplished something quite remarkable, in fact—they’ve made an exciting movie
about translation. Under Villeneuve’s careful
guidance, the exhausting, repetitive process of interpreting symbols crackles
with suspense. The main action of the
film occurs in tense conversations between the bewildered, stressed-out
characters, which generates plenty of drama by itself. But the filmmakers have made sure we understand
that something bigger is also at stake: communication between different species
is simply a more complex version of communication between members of the same species,
a process sometimes as fraught and plagued by failure even when using the same language.
It’s also the work of the movie. Arrival’s iconography--alien
creatures, space ships and suits, Army vehicles—translates the abstractions of
its thesis (language shapes the way we think and hence our very perception of
reality) into the concrete images of a deeply felt and very human story. In one of the film’s most striking sequences,
Banks and Connelly pay their first visit to the alien vessel--which is our
first visit, also. There, through a
series of unnerving changes in gravitational direction, the characters are
forced to step from floor to wall to ceiling in order to stay upright. They stand upside down or sideways in the
frame from our point-of-view while maintaining the normal up-down orientation
of theirs. Einstein’s law of relativity
may never have been so neatly demonstrated on film before. The visual discontinuities metaphorically
deliver Arrival’s central idea that
reality is what you perceive it to be and your perception literally depends on
where you’re standing.
Love can be just as disorienting, and Banks’ commitment to
unlocking the secrets of the aliens’ language becomes key to her developing relationship
with Connelly. Adams excels as both
committed scholar and vulnerable woman--her sensitive performance makes a cerebral
character (and storyline) vibrate with emotion.
As written, the linguist is, ironically, a person of few words, but
Adams makes each one count. It’s with
her eyes that she communicates most powerfully, however. Gazing intently at the aliens and their
symbols—Banks seems to be the only one not afraid of their forbidding
appearance—Adams reveals the linguist’s deep need to connect with the aliens. Her unflinching gaze at them is eventually turned
inward: solving the external puzzle is also a search for inner truth, the reason
behind her visions. The two mysteries intertwine
as plot developments and intimate revelations become indistinguishable. Eric Heisserer’s
admirable screenplay draws no distinction between Banks’ pursuit of professional
knowledge and her search for personal meaning.
Her heroic journey is not just out in the world but more critically
inside herself, an internal voyage toward self-discovery, where the secret of
the aliens’ visit also lies.
All this and a surprise twist the like of which I’ve seen in
only one other film, Nicolas Roeg’s supernatural thriller Don’t Look Now
(1973). Though the comparison is inexact, each film ingeniously leads
viewers to a conclusion that’s unexpected but wholly logical, as well as deeply moving. Arrival
combines its creative plotting with the
genre-bending substitution of a female protagonist’s viewpoint and subjectivity
for the standard masculine energy and action of sci-fi. Organizing
itself around the female gaze is unusual enough in commercial cinema, but Arrival is the more transgressive because it belongs to such a traditionally male-dominated genre. In fact by privileging a woman’s
point-of-view—and intellect and experience--over male prerogative, Arrival
doesn't simply depict an encounter with “alien” perspective and
language, it creates one of its own. And it’s precisely the difference of this point-of-view that allows it to communicate more authentically its
unconventional ideas on the interconnections between time, human subjectivity,
and the future of the planet. The beauty with which these interrelationships are demonstrated infuse each moment of this powerful film with a sense of life’s preciousness and
the paramount importance of all lived experience, no matter how disappointing,
inconclusive, or painful.
In that it truly speaks a universal language.
