Yesterday, as Jan and I try to do several times a month in our early retirement, we went out to see a movie and then have dinner. This time we saw Arrival.
Later that evening Jan would write on her Facebook page “Just saw Arrival, with Amy Adams as the female xenolinguist protagonist. I would have loved it just for that, even if it weren’t the most thoughtful & moving science fiction film I’ve ever seen! Spoiler alert: no hand-to-hand with aliens, no vehicle chases.” Pretty much sums it up.
Rotten Tomatoes gives us a plot summary for the film. “When mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe, an elite team–lead by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams)–are brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers–and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity.”
Alissa Wilkinson writing at Vox, tells us “its pacing is slower than you’d expect from an alien-invasion film, almost sparse. For a movie with so many complicated ideas, it doesn’t waste any more time on exposition than is absolutely necessary. Arrival is serious and smartly crafted, shifting around like a Rubik’s cube in the hand of a savant, nothing quite making sense until all the pieces suddenly come together. I heard gasps in the theater.”
Back to Rotten Tomatoes, ninety-three percent of the two hundred and fifty-nine professional reviewers give it at least one thumb’s up. And eighty-two percent of the forty thousand viewers who expressed an opinion for them were positive. Frankly, I was a little surprised. Subtle, slow moving, that word thoughtful keeps rising. Not what one normally gets, or I would think wants, when going to see a science fiction movie, and particularly, I’d think a first encounter film. And not in our jittery age where conflict and danger looms at the corner of nearly every heart.
The screenplay is by Eric Heisserer, and based on a novella, the Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang. It is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who is better known for horror movies. While more subtle than in your typical horror movies, he does know how to build a sense of tension. In supporting roles Forrest Whitaker’s Colonel Weber and Jeremy Renner’s Ian Donnelly are solid and believable characters, but the show belongs to Amy Adams, who creates a whole new character for a science fiction movie with her Dr Louise Banks, the linguist dragged into a scary moment for the earth.
Of late I’ve found myself thinking a lot about our human condition, and particularly the need to act even when we know we will lose, and when the action is at best morally ambiguous. Freedom and necessity are complicated things, increasingly I’m aware simply two sides to some single mystery. In particular thoughts from the Bhagavad Gita bubble up for me, and Arjuna’s conversations with God clothed for the moment as the warrior prince’s charioteer. Obligation. Destiny. Dharma in that sense of what it is we are called into being to be and to do. I felt echoes of those questions, and others, about who we are, about the nature of reality, all being explored in this little film.
Pretty good for Hollywood.
And, in these hard times, maybe offering some food for thought for all of us.
Worth seeing.
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