In Arrival, earthlings awaken one day to find a dozen very large, elliptical objects scattered at sites around the world – including China, Russia and, most important for us, rural Montana. They seem to come from another world; they’re really big, and they hover, point down, just a few feet above the surface of the Earth. The disconcerting sight of the huge yet delicate objects immediately puts you in a state of real unfamiliarity.
Meanwhile, a young woman (Amy Adams) teaches linguistics at a university. Louise was married and had a daughter, who died, and apparently the marriage died also. Now, she lives in a magnificent home on a lake, a bit lonely, very sad for the loss of her child, and ready for what happens. A military unit shows up, led by Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker), and right quick Louise Banks is whisked off to the site in Montana, where the U.S. Government expects her and a physicist from Berkeley (Jeremy Renner) to communicate with the visitors. The government wants it done fast.
These beings communicate essentially by way of smoke rings. They emit amorphous clouds of something, which then form into big circles with strange ganglia at various points. It’s impressive, and French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneueve pulls you into a web of startling uncertainty, with a layer of fear, and most of all, an overwhelming sense of wonder about what’s going on.
Yet for all that’s new and thrilling about Arrival, director Villeneuve builds the film on a platform for space invader movies that’s at least 65 years old. He pits the military people who see the ships as threats against the scientists who are curious and want to know these beings before they decide whether they’re hostile, friendly – or whatever. That basic configuration was the organizing dramatic principle for the space invader pictures of the early fifties that embodied the blunt stupidities of the Cold War. Those invaders were barely-disguised Soviet and Chinese commies coming here to get us.
The way those films broke down, the military stood for hard-headed kill ‘em McCarthy-ites, while the scientists represented those who thought that understanding was smarter and better than leaping into aggression. Those fifties films were not subtle. In the politically liberal The Day the Earth Stood Still, the space invader himself is played by skinny mild-mannered non-threatening English actor Michael Rennie, while the kind and curious scientist looks like Einstein. On the other side of the divide, in Howard Hawks’ brilliant pro-military film The Thing (from Another World), the soft-headed scientist who will put all humanity at risk wears Lenin’s goatee and a Russian-style winter hat.
These contrasts are not unknown to the makers of Arrival. Five years ago, screenwriter Eric Heisserer, wrote the remake of The Thing. And with director Villeneuve, the scientist/soldier confrontation in Arrival continues to frame the fundamental ambivalence we probably have about visitors from other worlds, only this film is a lot less ideologically rigid than those Cold War movies. If one of these vessels appeared tomorrow morning on somebody’s ranch near Julesburg, what would any of us do? We’d be plenty divided as a society, but also each of us within ourselves, about whether to grab a gun or go out there and try to talk. Arrival is especially good on how difficult it is to put fear and our reptile brains to the side and try to think through the situation, using our benevolence as well as our fighting selves. A few hundred thousand years of evolution and we’re still flummoxed by strangeness – do we fight it or welcome it, or something in between.
Arrival is a gorgeous movie to look at. The ship resting in silence and looking like a symmetrical squash poised above the Montana field draws a cascade of reactions from the psyche as you take it in. And the visual language becomes ever more expressive and subtle as the movie goes on.
