2016: The Year in FIlm: "Arrival" Review

Denis Villenueve is, full stop, one of my 3 or 4 favorite directors working today. His career is all of 5 years old at this point but his films have all, to this point, been distinctive, dark, and compelling enough to mark him as a director to watch. Prisoners and Sicario are two of the most memorable films for me of the last few years and his style - naturalistic yet stylized, artfully shot but relying on natural sounds at the expense of score and soundtrack, make his films intense and intimate feeling. (Oh, and for what it's worth, he's directing the Blade Runner sequel so mark that one down)

So when it was announced that his next project would be a sci-fi film about first contact with extraterrestrial life - I was a little surprised, but immediately on board. Enter, Arrival.

We are placed in an unspecified near-present where mysterious objects obviously of extraterrestrial origin suddenly appear in various spots around the planet. As the world panics, experts are tasked with figuring out just who the visitors are and what they want before the entire situation escalates into a potential war.  Louise (Amy Adams) is a linguistics professor and Ian (Jeremy Renner) is an astrophysicist and the two are brought in to hopefully find a way to communicate with the aliens in the spacecraft currently hovering above Montana.

The Good: like all of Villenueve's films to date this one looks immaculate. He has such a unique and valuable sense of space, of atmosphere, of setting. He uses very little score and soundtrack, relying instead on sounds from the environment and events happening on screen, giving this film a surreal sense of naturalism despite its otherworldly focus. The cast is tremendous. Especially Adams, but Renner and the always great Forrest Whitacker are great too, but Adams truly delivers a tour de force in this role. Her Louise is hyper-competent yet morose, intuitive yet brash, and so much of the film happens within her head that a lesser actor could have made the entire enterprise fall flat from the jump. Paced like a thriller yet at its heart a Contact-style meditation on the nature of communication, language, humanity and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, the film is equal parts Terrance Malick and Spielberg, and I mean that with the highest possible praise. Villenueve's Blade Runner 2049 simply can't come fast enough.



The Bad: there isn't much here, but if I do have criticisms it's that the entire operation on the ground is run by a colonel - and given that we are dealing with extraterrestrial contact, it seems unlikely that the joint chiefs or POTUS wouldn't be directly involved. Additionally, the film wraps up so quickly that you'll undoubtedly be left with questions - as I was.

Ultimately, in an era of action packed spectacle, an intimate, ultimately optimistic and uplifting meditation on the very nature of communication and understanding itself may be just what the doctor ordered in our dark times. Arrival is intimate, moving, unexpected, shot beautifully, tremendously acted and truly a gorgeous film. My favorite of the year so far.

9/10