Arrival

seen on 25 November 2016

The film, directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer (based on a story by Ted Chiang), stars Amy Adams as Dr Louise Banks, a linguist co-opted to interpret the language of alien visitors to earth who arrive in twelve spaceships hovering over different parts of the planet. Technicians from various countries are attempting communication, initially in cooperation with one another; later, when the Chinese conclude that the aliens' intentions are hostile, they and some other teams sever communication and prepare to attack. Jeremy Renner plays Ian Donnelly, a physicist attached to the Montana team, and Forest Whitaker plays Colonel Weber in charge of the team.

The film is presented entirely from Louise Banks's point of view, and Amy Adams gives a superb portrayal of a woman absolutely immersed in her professional life, while her personal life has apparently atrophied after the loss of her child. Her quixotic approaches to the problems of communicating with aliens are always underpinned by reasonable explanations derived from her experience with the way languages work and the pitfalls of jumping to conclusions. Her hunch that the Chinese may have been using games (such as chess) to circumvent the language barrier, and that therefore any understanding must have been coloured by the idea that in all encounters someone wins and someone loses, is just one example of the way she can expose assumptions which are too deep seated normally to be noticed.

The atmosphere is generally low key - the scenes of mass panic are very brief and mainly confined to poorly filmed news flashes. Louise's approach to everything is methodical and thorough; the dangers are (on the whole) overwork and loss of energy, not mind-numbing terror or exaltation. This makes the one episode of real physical danger all the more chilling, while allowing the audience to grow used to the pace and to accept the situation despite its implausibilities.

Villeneuve is helped in this by the full cast, and by his cinematographer Bradford Young and production designer Patrice Vermette, and especially by the fantastic score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, which adds immeasurably to the atmosphere of strangeness surrounding the whole enterprise. Louise's intuitions are sometimes hard to grasp, and the overall shape of what has actually happened and when retains an intriguing ambiguity throughout.

The result is a refreshing change from the usual bombast of sci-fi and first encounter movies - even though alien contact remains of its very nature almost impossible to imagine until (or uness) it actually happens, this is a really thought-provoking and enjoyable film.