It’s easy to say that Denis Villeneuve’s tingly sci-fi Arrival is a whole lot of Spielberg with a little bit of Tarkovsky thrown in, but what’s remarkable is how much it actually defies the conventions of its genre.
For starters, its hero—earth’s only hope, the person who bravely goes where no one has gone before—is a woman. When eight giant, pod-like space crafts land—actually hover over—earth, it’s linguist Dr. Louise Banks (the ever-expressive Amy Adams) who is called in by the American military to try to communicate with the aliens inside. She’s essentially snatched from her home early one morning and shuttled by noisy helicopter to the compound where the pod is waiting. In short order, she is being shot up with antibiotics, fitted for a bio-suit, and catapulted into the space ship. What’s so special about this is that the film acknowledges she’s scared (her hands shake as she is lifted into the pod) but she’s also fascinated, avid, and determined—qualities we usually see in a male hero. Along for the ride is Jeremy Renner’s Ian Donnelly, an astrophysicist who aids Banks with her work, but who is clearly following her lead. (Forest Whitaker plays the commander in charge of the operation, who’s torn between heeding Banks’s call for patience and an increasingly twitchy Pentagon.)
The second most remarkable thing are the aliens themselves. I don’t want to get too specific—even the film holds back on that for a bit—but these are not your father’s saucer-eyed, thin-necked extraterrestrials. What’s more, their language is not a language at all—at least not in the traditional sense. They have no sense of time, which creates a completely different way of perceiving and processing the world. It’s Banks who realizes that visual cues are the best way to communicate with them. She writes words like “human” and “Louise” on a marker board and the aliens respond with these ink blots that are a cross between a coffee cup stain and a Rorschach Test. It’s intriguing and thrilling to watch—a kind of “Linguistics, hell yeah!” in the spirit of The Martian.
If I’m making the film sound like it’s all, “rah, rah girl power” or some sort of rarefied intellectual exercise, please don’t get me wrong—Arrival is hella fun. It filled me with the same kind of awe and dread and wonder that all the best alien films do (yes, including Close Encounters). It’s also very smart about how the world might react to such a thing—a talk radio blowhard bashes the government for not blowing the UFOs out of the sky—and really has something to say about time and identity and our collective humanity. Indeed, the film’s prevailing message of unity and love is something we should all aspire to—now more than ever.