![\"arrival-poster-russia\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/81\/2016\/11\/arrival-poster-russia.jpg\")
<\/a>\nYesterday, 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. <\/p>\n
Later that evening Jan would write on her Facebook page \u201cJust saw Arrival, with Amy Adams as the female xenolinguist protagonist. I would have loved it just for that, even if it weren\u2019t the most thoughtful & moving science fiction film I\u2019ve ever seen! Spoiler alert: no hand-to-hand with aliens, no vehicle chases.\u201d Pretty much sums it up.<\/p>\n
Rotten Tomatoes gives us a plot summary for the film. \u201cWhen mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe, an elite team\u2013lead by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams)\u2013are brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers\u2013and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alissa Wilkinson writing at Vox, tells us \u201cits pacing is slower than you\u2019d expect from an alien-invasion film, almost sparse. For a movie with so many complicated ideas, it doesn\u2019t waste any more time on exposition than is absolutely necessary. Arrival is serious and smartly crafted, shifting around like a Rubik\u2019s cube in the hand of a savant, nothing quite making sense until all the pieces suddenly come together. I heard gasps in the theater.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back to Rotten Tomatoes, ninety-three percent of the two hundred and fifty-nine professional reviewers give it at least one thumb\u2019s 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\u2019d think a first encounter film. And not in our jittery age where conflict and danger looms at the corner of nearly every heart.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Colonel Weber and Jeremy Renner\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
Of late I\u2019ve 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\u2019m aware simply two sides to some single mystery. In particular thoughts from the Bhagavad Gita bubble up for me, and Arjuna\u2019s conversations with God clothed for the moment as the warrior prince\u2019s charioteer. Obligation. Destiny. Dharma<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Pretty good for Hollywood.<\/p>\n And, in these hard times, maybe offering some food for thought for all of us.<\/p>\n Worth seeing.<\/p>\n