 Tagline: Why are they here? When mysterious spacecrafts touch down across the globe, an elite team - led by expert codebreaker Louise Banks (Amy Adams) - is brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers – and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity. Storyline: When mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe, an elite team - led by expert linguist Louise Banks - is brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers - and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity. Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, February 1, 2017 Steven Spielberg may have already made the definitive alien contact movie with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Director Denis Villeneuve's (Sicario) Arrival does its best to challenge for that title. Arrival depicts first contact with the usual support structure bits and pieces -- like breathless gatherings around frenzied newscasts -- but it's quick to move beyond the media sensationalism surrounding the aliens' arrival and focus on the core story of a linguist whose discovery -- and the audience's discovery -- may be more substantial than merely cracking alien code or finding a way to communicate with a newly arrived intelligent species. The film further explores man's individual and collective reaction to change, uncertainty, doubt, and fear, but it's a core human story of awareness, understanding, choice, consequences, and coming to understand the real meaning of life and love. Without spoiling the film, its greatest impact comes in the form of self-reflection, acceptance, an understanding of fate, and, really, what it means to live and be alive. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is taken by helicopter to a remarkable sight: a visiting alien spacecraft. It's situated itself in a remote corner of Montana, one of a dozen located around the globe, arranged in a seemingly random pattern. She and Theoretical Physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) have been recruited by Colonel GT Weber (Forest Whitaker) to ascertain the answer to one simple question: "why are they here?" Banks finds almost immediate success communicating with the aliens. They appear friendly, if not keeping their intentions a mystery. As she works to decipher their unique form of written communication and discover her own purpose in the aliens' contact with Earth, the world's nations and militaries grow increasingly impatient and prepare for war. The film begins modestly with a quick and efficient and vital characterization followed by an eerie urgency of panic and fear. An alarm blares in a school. Security emerges en masse. Fighter jets zoom overhead. The mere presence of something different changes the world, exciting it, terrorizing it, shutting it down, and with the potential to bring out the best or worst man has to offer. The film rarely slows down from there. Villeneuve's craftsmanship keeps the intensity high in the first act, particularly as the film uses perspective in one place and sounds in another to fascinate and terrify the audience at the same time, revealing a literal alien world with different physical laws and characteristics, punctuated by startling music that elicits feelings of excitement, doubt, and fear all at the same time. Even as the film follows with a series of scenes that feature Louise attempting to communicate with the aliens, wanting to understand, first, how they perceive written communication and, later, deciphering what it means, the film still pushes towards that singular question: why? Why are they here? Communication is, at first, a barrier, the most obvious one, but so too is the very concept of human perception. Again without spoiling the film, Arrival proves to be much more than a simple back-and-forth between two species, more than the process of sorting through their written communication and appropriately translating it. It dives into some heady territory and some deep philosophical and psychological concepts along the way, too, particularly as so much is revealed in the third act. Hints, or things that could be interpreted as hints, are laced throughout. The visiting ships appear almost egg-like. The aliens' written language is, at its most fundamental level, circular in nature. Are those clues or coincidence? Something to keep in mind while watching the movie. If one could levy a criticism around the film, it would not be of the film itself, but rather its audience. It might be that man isn't quite ready to tackle the concepts it has to offer. They're hard, not in a way that the audience cannot decipher them, but hard in that it breaks down established and understood reality. It resonates and surprises in its own linear progression, but beyond that is a film that enters some exciting but at the same time terrifying areas that challenge the very notion of life as man has known it, thought of it, written of it, since he was able to wrap his head around it. The movie is about how man communicates not only with an alien race, but with himself. On a superficial level, Arrival banks on the excitement and terror of the unknown, the process of coming to understand the unknown, and its twist reveal in its final act. Yet it's so much more, a serious bit of art that does what so few examples of art do today: challenge. It will challenge the way people look at life and its progression, the way things work, and how humans perceive them to work. And it's hard. It could be argued that it's too emotionally hard to think of life in the way Louise comes to see it. The movie makes it accessible and, frankly, relatively simple, but the core concepts are pretty mind-blowing. All that said, it's a fantastic movie, very well conceived, and almost perfectly executed all-around (including a standout performance from Amy Adams). It's definitely a film worth re-watching both in an effort to pick up on any hints that point to its twist, better understand various context clues that link linguistics with the twist, make new thematic discoveries, feed on the challenge of better understanding all it has to say, and to simply enjoy watching it all unfold again. Arrival is a terrific film. It's smart. It doesn't engage in needless characterization, it doesn't bank on the sensation, it doesn't expend energy not required of it. It's sophisticated but accessible, a deep thinking man's film that opens itself up to a variety of interpretations, challenges, and has the potential to resonate with audiences who give it serious thought. It's more stable than Interstellar, more grounded than Contact. It certainly approaches Close Encounters, and perhaps considering its greater focus and sense of purpose, maybe it is the better film. There's no right or wrong answer, but the movie certainly makes for a terrific watch and represents a breath of fresh air in a stuffy landscape of repurposed and largely mindless cinema. Paramount's Blu-ray features good video reflective of a fairly drab source, excellent audio that doesn't quite reach its potential thanks to its technical limitations, and a decent array of bonus content. Very highly recommended. [CSW] -4.1- This is an alien encounter film that not so subtly promotes conflict resolution through language and reason over force while also attempting to tackle some of the big questions regarding the nature of time and love. For a movie that is ostensibly about visitors from outer space, Arrival offers a fair amount of profundity in regard to what it means to be human. A career defining performance by Amy Adams lends much depth, though the movie does veer towards the saccharine in its final minutes. This is not your usual SyFy film or violent in any way but I daresay as a PG 13, it may go over many of our teenagers heads. Not to diminish their sense of imagination but it is critical to pay attention to detail and storytelling as it is presented instead of waiting impatiently for the next scene. There are messages embedded for us, as a human race to acknowledge. We think language is paramount in communication and yet, it lines up with knowledge and science which gives way to intuition and art and physics and metaphysics and math. It is everything. Remember, out of this time, nothing is linear, which may help you when you see the film. True science fiction ends in an idea and not in an action and this is true thought provoking SyFy. Well written and masterfully produced, Arrival qualifies as a must see. [V4.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - D-Box Note: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken. Also called Whorfian hypothesis. It is largely disproven that that the languages we speak shape the thoughts we think, see: Linguistic relativity (Wikipedia). [Show Spoiler] Cast Notes: Amy Adams (Louise Banks), Jeremy Renner (Ian Donnelly), Michael Stuhlbarg (Agent Halpern), Forest Whitaker (Colonel Weber), Sangita Patel (Newscaster 1), Tzi Ma (General Shang), Abigail Pniowsky (Hannah [8 yrs. old]), Mark O'Brien (Captain Marks), Ruth Chiang (Chinese Scientist), Jadyn Malone (Hannah [6 yr old]), Anana Rydvald (Danish Scientist), Nathaly Thibault (Gala Guest), Julia Scarlett Dan (Hannah [12 yrs. old]), Leisa Reid (Nurse), Russell Yuen (Chinese Scientist).
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