Arrival (2016)

ARRIVAL

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Writers: Eric Heisserer (Screenplay), Ted Chiang (Based On The Story "Story Of Your Life")

Stars:  Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker 

Read IMDB review here

Movie Rating ★★★★☆

Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi contact drama is dreamy, freaky, and audacious. It skirts the edge of absurdity, as anything like this must, but manages to keep clear, and it includes a big flourish in the manner of early films by M Night Shyamalan, which adroitly finesses the narrative issue of what exactly to do with a movie about aliens showing up on Earth.

I have been agnostic about this kind of movie recently, after the overwrought disappointments of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special. But Villeneuve’s Arrival is both heartfelt and very entertaining.

As is now expected with this kind of film, the protagonist is a flustered, bewildered civilian with special expertise, brusquely pressed into service by the military, which has got the spacecraft surrounded in the short term.

Amy Adams is Dr Louise Banks, a professor of comparative linguistics with nothing and no one in her life but her work. But as it happens, Dr Banks was once seconded as a military adviser to translate a video of insurgents speaking Farsi. So when a dozen giant spaceships land in 12 different locations on Earth (including Devon – sadly there no scenes there), each looking like a bisected rugby ball standing on end, a bunch of army guys led by Col Weber (Forest Whitaker) show up on Louise’s doorstep, demanding she come with them to help translate what the aliens are saying. Why, you ask, did they not approach Noam Chomsky, with his understanding of “deep structure” in language? Perhaps Prof Chomsky did not care to help America’s military-intelligence complex.

At any rate, Louise’s liaison is the flirtatious Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), a military scientist who, in a stereotypical and fallacious way, equates his masculinity with science and affects to despise what he sees as the softer discipline of linguistics. Michael Stuhlbarg plays Halpern, the glowering CIA chief. But unbeknown to them, there is a secret tragedy in Louise’s life: a lost child, dead of cancer in her late teens. Her attempts to communicate with the aliens cause painful but illuminating echoes in her mind.

If a lion could speak, said Wittgenstein, we would not understand him. Does the same go for aliens? Spielberg solved this issue elegantly in Close Encounters of the Third Kind by making the form of communication a five-note musical phrase, ending questioningly on the dominant. Villeneuve’s solution is more literal. The aliens have a code which – a little preposterously – Louise finds herself more or less able to crack, with the crowd sourced expertise of the other 11 human-contact teams around the globe. But it is her human intuition, vulnerability and spontaneity that finally enable her to reach out to the visitors.

Inevitably, these “contact” moments are where the film’s real impact and atmosphere have to be. And Villeneuve doesn’t disappoint in sequences of eerie and claustrophobic strangeness – though I concede the film is most effective before the physical form of the aliens is revealed. There are also touches of comedy: Ian and Louise decide, for convenience’s sake, to nickname two aliens Abbott and Costello – maybe in homage to the linguistic misunderstanding in the duo’s famous routine about a baseball team’s positions.

By coolly switching focus to political intrigue and betrayal within the human ranks, Villeneuve keeps a grip on his story and creates ballast for its departure into the realms of the visionary and supernatural. And he also prepares us for the film’s sense that language itself, freed of our usual sense of its linear form, might be more important than anyone thought. (I wonder if Villeneuve has seen the 2010 documentary Into Eternity, by Danish film-maker Michael Madsen, about attempts to devise a new universal language to label underground repositories of nuclear waste – labels whose warnings have to be understood by future humans whose language has evolved away from what we know now.)

Arrival is a big, risky, showy movie which jumps up on its high-concept highwire and disdains a net. And yes, there are moments of silliness when it wobbles a little, but it provides you with spectacle and fervent romance.

Read full review at The guardian

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MOVIE RATING ★★✬☆☆

The film drowns in its own loquaciousness

 Arrival's most acute observation is how common language isn't the only key to keep communication going, but the film appears to not notice it.

A linguist at the vanguard against aliens. Who come in a spaceship that hangs like a comma, between a beginning and an end. A film that throws up such a vivid visual image — transported from Ted Chiang’s award-winning book Story of Your Life — should know the value of words. Both said and unsaid. And yet, Arrival is so conscious of its own loquaciousness that it drowns in it.

The linguist, Louise (Amy Adams), can’t stop talking about how there are no beginnings and endings, but “some days that define your story”. The aliens, or Heptapods, write in a smoky, hieroglyphic script whose letters are circles bookended by inky splotches. Louise’s daughter Hannah’s name is a palindrome or spelt the same way backwards and forwards. Heptapods are revealed to see time in a linear fashion, so no start and finish. The film can’t even resist from suggesting Louise’s house as a simulation of the Heptapod home.

And if all that is not enough to underline the illusion of time, Villeneuve — a director of no mean repute after Sicario — keeps flashing back to Louise and Hannah’s tender moments. The daughter dies at the start of the film, of a disease that shall not be named. Amidst tall grasses, against setting suns, over clinging hugs, these shots are very, very Terence Malik-like.

That is a disappointment given how Villeneuve and his team create a distinctive alien world that, after many, many films, is truly unearthly. We watch transfixed as the spaceship hangs there in a Montana field, and Louise, theoretical physicist Ian (Jeremy Renner) and the US Army General (Forrest Whitaker) commanding this operation enter it. It is a giant hollow, shaped like a sliced egg — another suggestion of a beginning — amidst floating, darkish clouds. Inside, there is no gravity, while rough, ordinary walls rise up to a rectangular transparent glass. On the other side of the glass are two Heptapods, whom Ian dubs Abbott and Costello.

Twelve of these spaceships have emerged out of nowhere and are parked now around the world. Of them, only one site, given the experience of disaster films, may surprise you — Pakistan. Clearly, the aliens, whether seeking peace or war, require better planning.

The US Army recruits Louise for this operation, as the professor earlier helped them translate “Farsi to catch insurgents”. They hope the language expert can help decipher the moanings they have recorded, believed to be the Heptapod language, so that they can know the purpose of this alien invasion. Ian is their other civilian recruit.

The entire world is at work, but the cooperation quickly dissipates. “Chairman of China’s PLA” deals the first blow to the detente, and Russia and Pakistan quickly follow — though, to the film’s credit, the Pakistanis do give the first clue about how the thing could be talking. This could have been Arrival’s most acute observation, on how common language isn’t the only key to keep communication going, but the film appears to not notice it.

On the other hand, Louise goes about translating Heptapods in a manner that is obtuse at best — and incongruous at worst when a decisive word comes up that is difficult to imagine in a normal conversation. From there on, the cliches and trite dialogues surmount (again, tragic, for a film celebrating a linguist).

There is one takeaway, though. In one of those lines that Arrival just throws in randomly, Louise tells the General that he should ask the other linguist the Army is looking at, “the meaning of the Sanskrit word for war”.

You see, she later answers triumphantly; it is “a desire for more cows”.

That explains a lot.

Read full review at The Indian Express

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Aliens Drop Anchor in ‘Arrival,’ but What Are Their Intentions?

In what’s perhaps the first science-fiction film — Georges Méliès’s 1902 marvel “A Trip to the Moon” — a group of astronomers lands in the Man in the Moon’s eye. They’re soon taken prisoner by moon men, but a quick-witted astronomer clobbers the king and they escape, with one earthling vanquishing moon men with an umbrella. Humans have been zapping extra-terrestrials ever since. It’s so easy to fight the unknown, at least in movies.

“Arrival” is a science-fiction parable in a distinctly more idealistic hopeful key than most movies in this genre, one in which the best solutions don’t necessarily materialize in a gun sight. It has a little action, a bit of violence and clenched-jawed jittery men. Mostly, it has ideas and hope, as well as eerie extra-terrestrials who face off with a soulful linguist-heroine, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the story’s voice of reason and its translator. She’s thoughtful, serious, at ease with her own silence and fears. She’d get along fine with Sandra Bullock’s character in “Gravity,” which like this movie leans into feeling and thinking, and reminds you again that there’s more to this genre than heavy artillery.

The movie begins with an elliptical prelude that guides you in but is forgotten as soon as the aliens touch down minutes later. The director Denis Villeneuve teases his way through these preliminaries, with shots of newscasts and panicked crowds, revealing just enough to work up some excitement. In a sly preview to things and tall creatures to come, Louise keeps looking up — at a blaring television, at shrieking military jets — turning Ms. Adams’s pale face into a screen for the movie that’s just starting to come into view. She’s soon hustled off to the show run by the military (Forest Whitaker plays the good cop, Michael Stuhlbarg the bad), having been enlisted to interpret the alien tongue.

Mr. Villeneuve likes big stories with big stakes, and he’s very skilled at working your nerves. In some of his movies, he punctures the stories with bluntly violent shocks — a stunned survivor seated before a burning truck in “Incendies,” corpses sealed inside a drug-house wall in “Sicario” — that distill terror into a grabber moment. These visuals can be real showstoppers (the narratives briefly shift into idle); they’re at once off-putting and unsettlingly seductive, and even if you want to look away, it can be hard to. Some of his limitations as a filmmaker are best expressed in the perfect crackling of those flames and the pictorial balance of that shot of walled-up torture victims.

“Arrival” doesn’t need self-regarding jolts. It’s based on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” one of those unassumingly smart science-fiction puzzles that blend absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is that Mr. Chiang not only raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human, but he also embeds them in his writing through different verb tenses and times. In one section, he rummages around in the past; in another, he jumps onto a separate timeline. The movie — the script is by Eric Heisserer — does something similar with cutaways to Louise’s life, shardlike glimpses that help fill in the whole.

Having been spirited away, Louise is moved into a makeshift military base in Montana, one of 12 locations across the globe where the aliens have dropped anchor. There, next to one of their enormous ships — a vessel that hovers over the ground and looks like an elongated black egg with one side neatly sliced off — she’s briefed and prepped amid furrowed brows, data crunching and intimations of the apocalypse. Once she settles in, the movie gets its groove on. The visitors have set up regular visiting hours for the humans, opening a portal through which a small team in hazmat suits can enter. As their machines whir, Louise and the rest gape across the cosmic divide and into the unknown.

The scenes inside the alien ship are transporting. After Louise and her team move through the ship’s portal, they end up in a large chamber facing a luminous rectangle, a kind of window — it looks like a movie screen — through which they can see the aliens. But the room is also a type of a stage, an immersive theater that engages sight, sound and a sense of touch. Louise’s hands and voice quaver, but her eyes shine and widen as the pleasure of the new — and knowing — edges out fear. And when her physicist colleague, Ian (Jeremy Renner), runs a gloved hand over one of the ship’s textured black walls, his expression suggests the delight of a child at the moment of discovery.

Mr. Villeneuve nods to “2001: A Space Odyssey” here and there in the astronaut-like hazmat suits, the allusions to the abyss (the humans sometimes float, as if in space) and of course the looming monoliths, one of them named Stanley Kubrick. These references can seem decorative, almost ritualistic, with one director paying homage to a master. “Arrival” isn’t a visionary movie, an intellectual rebus or a head movie; it’s pretty straight in some respects and sometimes fairly corny, with a visual design that’s lovely rather than landmark. And, as it revisits some of the uncertainties in “2001” — free will, extraterrestrials, God — it seems to turn inward instead of out. (It does both.)

By turns inviting and opaque, Ms. Adams turns softness and quiet into heroic qualities, keeping her voice low, modulated, and using stillness to draw you near. In a nice reversal of how many puzzlers work, the movie becomes more fragmented the closer that Louise gets to figuring out why the aliens have arrived, what they want from Earth and why. Increasingly, her steadiness becomes the very foundation for the narrative, which serves its meaning beautifully. The movie complicates Mr. Chiang’s story, adding action scenes and political notes, which comes off as pretty puny compared with its larger, grander adventure about a woman who, in staring into the void, leaps into life and finds herself.

Read full review at New york times.

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆

Sleek, sophisticated and thoughtful ‘Arrival’ joins a mini golden age of sci-fi films

With its intriguing premise and handsome production values, “Arrival” continues an encouraging trend in science-fiction filmmaking, embodied by the likes of “Gravity” and “The Martian”: films that imbue the genre’s inherent flights of fancy with sophistication and meaningful subtext.

In this adaptation of a short story by Ted Chiang, director Denis Villeneuve (“Prisoners,” “Sicario”) announces from the outset what kind of journey he intends to take us on. Opening with a musical score of mournful strings, which are soon joined by a somber voice-over by Amy Adams, it’s clear that we’re in for a serious-minded reflection on memory, time and, as a few early scenes indicate, overwhelming grief.

In other words, you’ve been warned.

As with so many movies this season — from “Loving” and “Manchester By the Sea” to the supposedly cheerful musical “La La Land” — many viewers are probably in for a cry at “Arrival,” but it’s the good kind. Working from a thoughtful script by Eric Heisserer (“Lights Out”) and a superb, quietly interior performance by Adams, Villeneuve has crafted a movie akin to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Contact”: an imaginative, escapist what-if scenario overlaid with semi-profound questions about fate, loss and the meaning of love. “Arrival” can’t be described as philosophically deep, exactly. But neither does it sacrifice worthy ideas on the altar of pure entertainment. Rather, Villeneuve understands that the best movies are those that allow the two to coexist in unforced, tolerant balance.

Because “Arrival” is so carefully constructed as a continually unfolding series of “reveals,” the less synopsis the better. Suffice it to say that Adams plays Louise Banks, a linguist who is called in by the U.S. government when a mysterious ovoid object appears just above Montana, hovering ominously over the prairie like one half of an enormous almond. It turns out that 11 more spacecraft just like it have popped up at other locations around the globe. Louise, along with a rakishly handsome physicist played by Jeremy Renner, is tasked with establishing communication with the intergalactic visitors, and finding out what they want.

The premise of “Arrival” is elegantly simple — see UFO, approach UFO, stop UFO from destroying the world or vice versa — and Villeneuve wisely doesn’t mess with it. The power of the film lies in its intricate structure, which is a tricky series of fakes and feints that keep viewers unsure, exactly, of what they’re seeing, in terms of time frames and subjective reality. The danger with a film this purposefully enigmatic and scrambled is that the viewer becomes hopelessly lost. This is where Villeneuve’s gifts as a craftsman come sharply into play, as he allows “Arrival” to be as enigmatic as possible until giving the audience a crucial, orienting piece of information — gratifyingly, with relatively little chitchat and dumbed-down action.

Rather than those usual superfluous distractions, “Arrival” hews to its sleek, unfussy storytelling, which is both suspenseful and almost poetically abstract, an effect heightened by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s unsettling score. Photographed with muted shadows and understated style by Bradford Young, and visualized with elegant simplicity by production designer Patrice Vermette, the movie is suffused with mystery, not only about the visitors’ designs on the planet, but about Louise’s sometimes confounding air of dazed bemusement at making first contact with alien life-forms.

Staged by Villeneuve to make the most of its potential for spectacle, “Arrival” is often awesome to look at, especially when Adams, Renner and their characters’ colleagues are dwarfed by the pendent obelisk they’re desperately trying to understand. Coming on the heels of a fractious election season, “Arrival” could reflexively be interpreted as an allegory about immigration, communication and belligerence. But the climactic encounter, when it finally occurs, is staged almost as an afterthought and, after all the scientific and linguistic jargon has been spouted, maybe not the point. Nothing is precisely what it seems in “Arrival,” until it all becomes clear, like one of the film’s spindly, squidlike beings emerging out of the mist. Muted, measured and meditative, “Arrival” brings taste and restraint to a genre in the midst of a mini golden age: It comes in peace.

Read Full Review at The washington Post

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆

word of warcraft

Cinema is beautiful for how it allows us to safely experience the dangerous lives of many. In that sense, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival has provided me with perhaps the best vicarious experience I’ve had in a movie theatre for a long time now. It shows exactly how an average person will likely react to an UFO in the neighbourhood, how they will feel when approaching an alien. As Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams in a sensationally understated and effective portrayal of a linguist) stands dwarfed by the towering egg-shaped UFO, as she sweats and turns breathless at the prospect of stepping into this unknown vehicle to encounter unfamiliar beings, the music lowers into a deep, pulsating rumble. It’s impossible for you not to be breathless at the prospect too. You realise at that moment that this is exactly how an encounter with an alien would likely be. You wouldn’t rush at it with excitement. You wouldn’t cower from it in fear. You’d take tentative, cautious steps of curiosity, all the while unable to reconcile with the reality of it all. The closest we will likely come to touching an alien spacecraft in our lives is when Dr. Banks hesitantly places her trembling fingers on the underbelly of the vehicle. Those moments are alone worth the admission price.

The usual narrative in these films is one of hostility and war. It’s us versus them. It’s of global unity in the face of an external threat. Arrival is about unity too, but it attempts to bring this positive ending without reducing the other to a destructive villain prototype. Far too often, in the usual films, there is little, if any, effort at establishing communication with the invaders. To be fair, it’s dreadfully difficult to communicate with those who don’t talk our language, let alone whose very definition of language is unrelatable. As Dr. Banks shows in the film, what we deem to be a simple sentence—lines we effortlessly, instinctively use in everyday conversation—are a result of our having assimilated complex linguistic ideas. You’d have to teach an alien these concepts. You’d have to understand theirs. And in any case, how do you communicate to another being when their writing isn’t based on phonetics? Even as you read these sentences, you read them aloud in your head and make sense of them. What if these letters, these sentences, are merely pictures that attempt to convey meaning? What if they didn’t have associations with sound? Arrival makes you reflect on these concepts till you develop a minor headache.

Villeneuve’s film, based on a short story by American sci-fi writer, Ted Chiang, is about the complexities of language. It also, as a side-note, portrays how the world would typically react to such an invasion. Countries wouldn’t immediately unite in a saccharine display of solidarity. Some would want to lead, some would want to follow. Some would want to attack, some others would want to wait. It’d just be… complex. If you are the sort to have long, unwinded conversations about films well after they are over, you’ll find plenty to talk about after Arrival. It even posits that your skills could well be determined by the language you speak. As Banks says, “Learning a new language rewires your brain.” In fact, I’d have loved to learn the deep intricacies of how Banks eventually makes sense of the alien language, how she manages to make them understand hers. It’d perhaps have been too dry for many… for those who, no doubt, will read that the film is about an alien invasion, and expect to see explosive aerial battle sequences. The explosions here are of the mental variety.

I’d have loved to discuss the big twist at the end in great detail, but let’s just say I ended up wishing that the film were a drama centred on that twist. I’d not have missed much, had the film been devoid of the red herring that the potential alien attack is. If you really wanted to nit-pick, I guess you could say that Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker don’t particularly have too much to do. But take nothing away from Arrival, one of those rare thoughtful mainstream films. As the film ended, I couldn’t but laugh at the cheekiness and the irony of the opening line that in hindsight, gives away the end: I thought the story began here, but this was the end. Go figure.

Read Full Review at The Hindu
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Movie Rating ★★★✬☆

Alien movie strikes a fine departure point with ideas of language

At last, a science fiction movie with a brain. There has been so much bad sci-fi since Star Wars that it's good to remember that speculative fiction – as it prefers to be known – is one of the richest forms of literature, in terms of ideas.

Arrival is based on Story of Your Life, a short story by Ted Chiang, one of the brightest stars in the sci-fi firmament.

The story, and now the movie, is about a difficult problem in linguistics – whether the form of a language affects the way its users think (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, to its friends). In other words, is human language based on universal cognitive processes or is it relative? It's kind of important to sort this out – especially when you are talking to an alien.

So Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is woken one night by a helicopter landing on the lawn of her million-dollar house by a lake somewhere in north America. Forest Whitaker, in military fatigues, tells her to pack her bags: the world needs your linguistic skills.

Banks is grieving after a loss, but the arrival of 12 lozenge-shaped alien craft in various parts of the world takes precedence. En route to Montana, where one of the BBTs (big black things) hovers on its end just above ground, she meets Dr Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), theoretical physicist and good egg. In short order, they suit up and head out to the base of the visitor for their first close encounter. Every 18 hours, explains Colonel Weber (Whitaker), a door opens and we go inside.

The movie stands or falls on what happens next. If we do not watch this with a mixture of fear and awe, all is lost. The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario) invokes the gods – Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick – for guidance. From Kubrick we get a sense of space, as in big: the humans are tiny vulnerable voyagers into the dark square tunnel of the ship's interior. From Malick we get a sense of transcendence: the sheer bloody magnificence of such an encounter, the thrill of discovering that yes, we are not alone, and they do not seem to want to hurt us. It's bold, and Villeneuve makes it work.

We have seen a few films in which a lone woman goes into the unknown to find the secret – Jodie Foster showed the way to the stars in Contact. Here, Banks is so broken that she has little to lose: she peels off her suit so the aliens can see her face, through the huge shimmering screen that separates them like a caul. Communication can now begin, if she can just work out how to begin.

This failure to communicate is often treated as an obstacle to plot in alien movies, so the writers invent something hokey. In Arrival, it is the plot. There are 12 of these things and 12 different countries trying to talk to them, simultaneously. If one country misinterprets the signals, all hell might break loose. Which brings us back to the original point: if language is relative, then so is world peace. If the Chinese think differently because they speak Chinese, they might react differently to a large heptapod from outer space that looks like a giant octopus and seems to communicate in ink blots. The future of the world depends on cracking this calamari code.

As serious as some of the ideas are here, science fiction always carries a risk of silliness. Arrival holds itself upright for a long time before it succumbs, but opinions about that will be relative, so to speak. The more you engage with the ideas, the further it will take you. The more you see the rise of soppy sentimentalism, the less so.

Adams and Renner have the chops to keep us watching, even when the narrative starts to wobble. And Villeneuve has never been bolder, in terms of visual style. This is a gorgeous film to look at, an eye-popping, ear-caressing adventure in which to ponder big questions. It's a long way from "Take me to your leader", but it raises the same problem in an original way. Not Since Spielberg's five-note greeting in Close Encounters have we seen something that recognises the distance we might have to cover if we want to communicate better. And not just with aliens.

Read full Review at Sydney Morning Herald

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Movie Rating ★★★☆☆

Amy Adams' close encounter with aliens and conflict

The alien spacecraft in "Arrival" arrive by the dozen, each of the looming, egg-sliced-in-half-shaped wonders looking like the latest in KitchenAid gadgetry writ large. All around the globe, their contents a mystery to paranoid earthlings, the visitors hover just above the planet's surface. Why have they come? Do they come in peace? Will the U.S. military and other nations' leaders give peace a chance?

True to the spacecraft, director Denis Villeneuve is one sleek craftsman. Every subtle camera crawl, each darkness-shrouded visual composition in "Arrival" conspires to unsettle us and hold us in a state of dread or wonder, without being cheap about it. A French Canadian by birth whose best film remains (for now) "Incendies," a complex mystery based on a stage play, Villeneuve is coming off a couple of well-made pulp outings, the child abduction revenge thriller "Prisoners" (gripping for an hour, then dragged down by its own worst impulses) and the drug cartel maze "Sicario," similarly strong for much of its running time before settling for the usual.

"Arrival" has little of the usual. It may frustrate or confuse viewers who prefer their humanist science fiction on the order of "The Martian." Screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapted Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," a few non-spoiler-y details of which can be relayed. At the start, we hear Amy Adams (terrific, her technique clean and exact) in voice-over, speaking to the girl we see with her on screen. They're mother and daughter, together over the years. But too young the girl dies, leaving the Adams character, Louise, alone and the girl's father out of the picture.

Louise is a linguistics professor and translation whiz, and "Arrival" sets up its increasingly tricky narrative beautifully. The halved-egg alien saucers arrive; the world freaks out; the U.S. military, personified by gently intense Forest Whitaker, shows up at her office door out of nowhere, sussing out Louise's interest in learning how to crack the (literally) otherworldly beeps and pops and guttural somethings emitted by the inhabitants of the spacecraft. Jeremy Renner plays Louise's partner in research, a physicist compelled more by science than language. They're helicoptered to where one of the spacecraft hovers, motionless, just above a field in Montana.

The film builds its mystery scene by scene. Under the sway of the alien visitation, Louise's memories of her late daughter grow more and more baffling. Meantime there's a new language to learn, elusive visual symbols that, as we see on countless video monitors in various tents, are being interpreted differently by different linguists around the world. (A key alien phrase, setting off the alarmists who lack Louise's knowledge: "use weapon.") Many of the most effective passages in "Arrival: are paced deliberately; there are times, though, as in Louise's key solo encounter with the half-an-egg dwellers, when "deliberate" becomes "static." By that point in the narrative, the explanations begin their arrivals, and I honestly can't tell if they'll be intriguing and provocative enough to make this thing a hit. It deserves to be.

Villeneuve may be a visual stylist, inspired by everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg to Terrence Malick, but he lets the performers do their thing. (Michael Stuhlbargskulks around the edges as a CIA adviser, advising a more confrontational approach with the tourists from above.) Shot under gray skies and in artful shadows by cinematographer Bradford Young, scored to wickedly disorienting music by Oscar-nominated "Sicario" composer Johann Johannsson, "Arrival" will cast a spell on some while merely discombobulating others. Right there, I'd say that indicates it's worth seeing. And in its central idea — not to be discussed here, sorry — the old saw "no time like the present" takes on new shadings.

read full Review  at The Chicago Tribune

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Movie Rating ★★★✭☆

In sleek, smart ‘Arrival,’ a meeting of the minds

“Arrival” is predicated on the eminently practical notion that if aliens ever land on Earth we should send in Amy Adams.

Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist, an academic, and (the film gently implies) the biggest brain in the room. Yet she’s a recognizably Adams character as well, meaning that Banks is intelligent, accomplished, and hesitant — very much part of the action while stepping uncertainly back from its edges. That’s why, and how, we relate to her. “Arrival” is as epic in conception as movies get, but at heart it’s a drama about one scientist gathering the nerve to follow her intuitions and gain mastery over an unexpectedly fractured life.

Twelve spaceships have appeared at points around the planet, immense black monoliths — the nod to “2001: A Space Odyssey” seems overt — that hover on end a few feet off the ground. Each major nation has its UFO to contend with, and there are fractious squabblings as their scientific communities vie with their generals over whether to share information with other countries or to keep mum and lock and load. The nod to 1951’s classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” seems overt, too, with its message that humans need to make peace and find common ground at the risk of becoming alien snack food.

Dr. Banks is brought in by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), the ranking officer in charge of the US UFO, because the aliens want to talk to us and no one knows what “talking” for them even means. She’s choppered out to Montana, where the spacecraft looms placidly in a field, a makeshift human Quonset-hut village built around it. So far, so very “Close Encounters,” and “Arrival” is even more clearly in tune with the recent wave of serious science fiction entertainments. Sleek, smart, and beautifully produced, it’s in the grown-up room with the heady pop philosophizing of “Inception” and “Interstellar,” with “Gravity” and its imperiled heroine, and with the global tensions and triumphs of “The Martian.”

So why, with all these feelers sent out to acknowledged influences, does “Arrival” stand on its own? Why is it the best work yet from director Denis Villeneuve? The film’s look has a lot to do with it, especially once the research team gets into the spacecraft and attempts communication with the inhabitants. How do you make a believably unbelievable alien these days? You’ll have to see for yourself — I’m not going to tell you — but the production team manages to convey an incomprehensible off-world intelligence with tantalizing hints of physical enormity and a language/writing/speech matrix that resembles nothing so much as improvised Zen calligraphy.

Those scenes in the darkened interior of the ship are the movie’s core, the scientists huddled first in hazmat suits, then daring to breathe free as the sense of threat diminishes, the aliens appearing and disappearing in the mist like glimpses of an elephant’s knuckle. Outside, the humans are getting ornery, and the most conventional scenes in “Arrival” dramatize a race against time. Will Banks and the others learn what the ETs are trying to tell us before our political leaders lose their heads and launch the missiles? Given what we’ve learned about human nature over the past year, the suspense feels genuine.

Villeneuve, who’s French Canadian, has made his name with portentous, skillfully made dramas that dye their genre roots. Last Year’s “Sicario” was a disreputable vigilante flick disguised as a moral thriller, while “Prisoners” (2013) turned a kidnap-and-revenge plot into a doomy Ethics 101 class. No one’s sure what “Enemy” (2013) was, aside from the director’s shot at a David Lynch-style mind-trip.

With “Arrival,” Villeneuve lightens up just enough to attend to the popcorn pleasures of science fiction and alien-arrival movies. At the same time he gives weight to the parts of the film that deserve it: The hushed encounters between Banks and the aliens, the drama of her thought processes and guesswork, the excitement of her collaboration with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner, most excellent), which you know will probably get romantic someday but not now, for pity’s sake. Not when there’s work to be done.

As is usually the case with heroes, Banks has a tragedy in her past, or so we’re given to understand. The movie springs a series of surprises in the final act, and you may realize as one and then another rug is pulled out from under your feet that you’ve been cheated — that what the movie shows is not the same as what it tells. When such narrative chicanery works, and it does for the most part in “Arrival,” the audience’s delight in feeling the puzzle snap together knows few bounds. That said, there’s a piece to this jigsaw that Villeneuve has to hammer into place, and I’m sad to say it never really fits. A phone number is involved. You’ll know when you get there.

But this is still fine, full-bodied filmmaking, with a sense of the alien-ness out there in the universe that flatters our intelligence while making us feel tantalizingly small. The otherworldly spirit extends to Patrice Vermette’s production design, the sound and effects teams, and the spectral accomplishments of the score by Jóhan Jóhannsson , who is on his way to becoming the most original thinker in a hidebound soundtrack industry.

That said, “Arrival” would be nothing without Adams. By the film’s final scenes, we have come to understand that Dr. Banks has accrued the kind of knowledge that might break an oak tree but only bends a sorrowful reed, and that the most courageous traveller may be the one who can navigate the metaphysical byways of her own life. “Arrival” works because Adams, Villeneuve, and everyone involved understand that alien invasion movies are, in the end, about exploring inner space.

Read full Review at Boston Globe
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Movie Rating ★★★★★

Amy Adams shines in a close encounter of the Oscar-worthy kind: Arrival is one of the best sci-fi films you’ll see this decade
I don’t know about you, but I love a high-concept film that stays high-concept right to the end: no sudden decision in the last reel that what we really need is ‘guns, lots of guns’, or a maddening revelation that it was all a dream. I love cleverness that stays clever... all the way to the cinematic finishing line.

Which is exactly what happens in the outstanding Arrival. It makes its big reveal, everything suddenly falls into place, and, almost before you’ve had time to think ‘Wow, that’s clever’, the end credits roll. Fabulous.

Sure, two days later the doubts and second thoughts set in. Wasn’t the visual depiction of the aliens a bit disappointing? And what about the stereotypical portrayal of the Russians and Chinese as trigger-happy warmongers? There are also likely to be, I should warn you, several puzzling points, all prompting the same query: ‘So, how come if…?’

But for me, that didn’t matter. I can see the modest weaknesses in the film, but its strengths outweigh them and the end result, with its echoes of Close Encounters, Independence Day and 2001: A Space Odyssey, is not just one of the best sci-fi films you’ll see this year but quite possibly this decade.

 It’s intelligent, pleasingly complex and visually fascinating. In short, it’s a sci-fi film for grown-ups, albeit, I should add, grown-ups of all ages.

It’s anchored by a nomination-grabbingly good performance from Adams. She plays university linguistics expert Louise Banks, who is called in by the US military when 12 huge ovoid spacecraft arrive on Earth. Despite the fact each one is 1,500ft high and must weigh thousands of tons, they hover effortlessly above the surface of the planet.

But do they come in peace or threatening an Independence Day-style war? Nobody knows because nobody can understand a single word the ships’ occupants are saying. Which, of course, is where Louise comes in. 

Because what the waiting outside world doesn’t yet know is that every 18 hours, a portal opens in the base of these spacecraft, and small teams of human experts are admitted for a mind- and physics-bending close encounter with the ships’ occupants. And, for once, we don’t spend the whole film waiting to discover what they look like.

The movie is directed by Denis Villeneuve, the Canadian director best known for the vigilante drama Prisoners in 2013 and for Sicario, the highly rated drugs-trade thriller released last year. 

Although he’s moving into a very different genre here, he brings the same creative skills, building layers of tension and dramatic intensity with impressive skill. If you can’t already see why Ridley Scott chose him to direct the long-but-anxiously awaited sequel to Blade Runner (due out next year), then his equally remarkable command of some wonderful visual effects surely settles the matter. 

This is seriously good film-making.

It’s a puzzling second story, however, unfolding in parallel to the first, that gives the film an emotional depth and Adams the chance to shine. Because from the start – thanks to increasingly sombre flashbacks – we know that Louise has lost a teenage daughter to cancer, a very human tragedy that may well have also taken a toll on her marriage, because there’s no sign of a husband.

No wonder she seems sad and insular in her working life, warming only slowly to the Los Alamos theoretical physicist (Jeremy Renner) who’s been brought along to help her work out what the aliens’ series of groans and clicks might actually mean.

Arrival is a rare film that gets better and better as it goes along, as you slowly stop comparing it to similar sci-fi films that have gone before, start enjoying it in its own right, and wait for the exquisite moment when the two narrative strands come together.

I loved the lesson in linguistics we get along the way, and Adams’s very unglamorous, very non-Hollywood portrayal of Louise. It’s not often in the film world that a normal fortysomething professional woman is allowed to look like a normal fortysomething professional woman, but Arrival is all the better for it. 

It’s also nice to see Renner – who seems to have been very much in superhero mode of late – tackling a serious role and reminding us what a good actor he is.

I do slightly worry that Arrival may be a bit too clever for its own commercial good, but how often these days are we able to say that of a science-fiction film? It gets the full five stars from me

Read full review at Daily Mail

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆

A brainy sci-fi film with an out of this world performance from Amy Adams

America is sent into mass paranoia and panic by the arrival of a bombshell from the sky — no, not the election of President Trump but an alien spacecraft floating above Montana. The UFO looks like a vast river-polished stone, 20 storeys high. In arrival more of these strange craft hover over countries from China to Venezuela as mankind teeters on the verge of global war.

There are riots in the streets, calls for a pre-emptive strike on the alien craft and chaos in a leaderless, knee-jerk, bickering world. But, for once, hope rests not with politicians or generals but scholars — linguists who will attempt to communicate with the alien presence in the menacing ships.

This is less Close Encounters of the Third Kind and more Linguistic Encounters of the Academic Kind, starring Amy Adams in a sci-fi movie that’s cerebral and emotional. Adams plays Dr Louise Banks, a language lecturer swept up in the night by a military helicopter and delivered to a base in Montana where she is vaccinated against all sorts of nasty possibilities, given breathing apparatus and an orange hazmat suit and tossed into the black maw of the spaceship.

The director, Denis Villeneuve, is a master of edgy tension, as he proved in Sicario and Prisoners and he induces cold sweats and stomach-gnawing fear as Banks and her co-civilian, the physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), take a giant leap into the unknown for mankind. The unknowns here are gravity turned on its head and a fourth dimension of time — which is worth keeping a close eye on if you want to make sense of this. The aliens I will leave to surprise you on screen but their “speech” sounds like whales singing down a bad telephone connection. Banks is charged with communicating that age-old question: do you come in peace or to blow us to pieces?

Adams turns in a terrific performance, her looks understated, her mind expanding exponentially to meet those of the aliens. In early scenes, which at first seem to be from another film or another life, we see her with her young daughter playing by a lakeshore, drawing pictures, and later at the hospital bedside of the child. A deep melancholy pervades Banks after this — her world always looks grimy and vaguely out-of-focus, as though she is wading through the sludge of life. Adams conveys this repressed sadness so well, plus a sparky intelligence and wit, that an Oscar nomination for best actress must surely be in the stars.

I always thought Renner was miscast as the peripheral Hawkeye in the Avengersseries but as support to Adams he is in sweet-geek mode and adds gentle ballast — and a funny projectile-vomiting scene — to the drama. The two academics are in constant opposition to their rule-bound, trigger-happy military bosses led by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker). Bucking the rules brings Banks and Donnelly closer together, as does deciphering the linguistic and mathematical codes of the aliens, whom they nickname Abbott and Costello.

This is a sci-fi with few bangs and whistles, although a war of the worlds is imminent as the academics translate against the clock. Instead the story is about communication, understanding and the misunderstanding that can come so easily when conversations are not face-to-face. There are many metaphors embedded that seem weightier in these days of Trump triumph than they did when the film premiered at the Venice festival.

While the alien spaceship in a misty, green Montana valley seems ethereal, perhaps made from some ancient stone, and glows in Bradford Young’s cinematography, the outer world is seen in frenetic 24-hour television broadcasts. The Russians and the Chinese seem to favour an attack, while the British poddle along with the American tide. Panic is fanned by government secrecy and media scaremongering. “Save our species!” is graffitied on walls and shock-jock TV presenters urge the military to strike. Nothing whatsoever has happened apart from 12 UFOs a-hovering, but the world is in fight-or-flight mode.

To say much more about the specific alien encounter would spoil the film, since there is a freshness in the way Villeneuve tackles this well-trodden territory. What’s fascinating is how the human and alien minds work and the explanations of language systems. Round the world each nation is trying to communicate with its local aliens — the Chinese have resorted to a mahjong set — with a warlike win-or-lose vocabulary, while Banks is more subtle.

The story reminded me of Victorian explorers entering dark tunnels in the pyramids and deciphering hieroglyphs with the Rosetta Stone. There are black symbols sprayed large on the screen and a telepathic connection that raises emotional memories for Banks. These memories are a key to a Möbius strip of a plot which makes this film much smarter than your average sci-fi

Read full review at The times
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