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Arrival



Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Written by: Eric Heisserer

     Twelve ships have landed all across the world.  These odd shaped ships are anyone's guess.  Where did they come from?  What do the beings on these ships want?  You know, the usual first contact stuff we've seen before.  But Arrival takes on a slightly different tone than what we're used to seeing.
     With the arrival of these ships, a team of highly skilled and qualified personnel travel to one site to investigate.  This team, led by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), needs someone to decipher the alien language in order to make official contact.  That person is Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguistics professor at an unnamed university.  With the world on edge, and potentially on the verge of global war, it's up to Louise to find out the answers to everyone's questions.
      There are a great many so called "first contact" films and stories.  There are so many that one might argue that it has become a sub-genre of sic-fi.  The nice thing is that there is no shortage of material to compare Arrival to.  I would argue that there are two types of first contact films; the Independence Day type, and the Close Encounters of the Third Kind type.  Both tell the same story (with some variations), but in two different ways, for two different purposes.
      The Independence Day type involves lots of action and explosions.  The aliens have come to earth with a purpose very clearly stated.  They do not wish the earthlings well and come at the entire planet with guns blazing.  Usually the aliens come here to find resources or mine the earth or enslave all of humanity, or some other purpose that involves total warfare between the two races.  Arrival is not like this even in the slightest.
      The Close Encounters type is far different.  These are films in which the purpose of the aliens is unknown and the point of the story is to figure out why they are there in the first place.  In the case of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens have come to earth in peace, or so it appears.  There is a delicate balance so as to not tip the scale towards warfare.  Establishing contact is key and usually what takes up a good portion of the film.  Arrival fits into this category quite well.
      Films such as Close Encounters and Arrival have a certain mystique to them.  As audience members, we can know most of what will happen by the end of the plot, but not everything.  The film's themes are as much shrouded in mystery as these ships are.  The characters do not mesh all that well, making for a more difficult mission to find out why the aliens are here.  The details of these characters are sparse as well.
      Some might argue that Arrival is the best first contact film ever.  I would argue that director Denis Villeneuve has simply set the bar extremely high for future first contact films.  There will always be the classics like Close Encounters or the lesser known ones deserving of more attention like Contact, and perhaps Arrival fits somewhere in between.  I believe this is a film that scholars of cinema will study for decades to come, especially students of science fiction.  It is a film that cannot be seen just once, but multiple times as there is so much to be seen.  This is a slow paced film and it feels like it's about five hours long, but so worth it!  Arrival is far and away one of the best movies of the year!

I give Arrival an A+.

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