Arrival [Review by Haus]

Probably my favorite April Fool’s news story was that one a few years back reporting a strange man rummaging around the CERN large hadron collider and claiming to be a time traveler from the future. It went on to describe, as I recall, that the man seemed to have no documented past (why would he!) and that he uttered some cryptic predictions and then mysteriously vanished.

What made that a great story is precisely the same thing that makes a great alien movie: you start with one big ask for suspension of disbelief (time travel, say, or aliens showing up) and then play by normal rules from then on out. (District 9 did this beautifully; Independence Day: Resurgence, for instance, not so much.) The more realistic you make everything else, the more that one big ask seems ever more palatable — and the door is suddenly open to a really engaging tale.

Arrival is an alien movie that does it right. Here’s its one big ask: Twelve giant spaceships mysteriously touch down around our planet, sitting quietly — and every 18 hours a door in each opens up. Humans at each landing site enter and try their hands at de novo communication, and the race is on to determine the aliens’ intentions before we snap and blow them up (or vice versa). But once this fairly rote sci-fi stage is set, Arrival just broods, slowly steeping in a quiet and moody surrealism. From the way we first learn of the spaceships’ arrival to the saber-rattling multinational response and the varied, guarded efforts to make first contact, it all just seems plausible, anchored, honest. Disbelief is properly suspended. And there’s a surprisingly engaging backstory, to boot.

Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics professor and extreme polyglot whisked in by the military to broker first contact with the aliens and to decipher their language. What follows is a methodical tale of linguistic discovery, mostly involving glyph-scribbling amid steady military escalation. But while her rudimentary communication with aliens is eminently watchable, Adams really astonishes somewhere else: She anchors Arrival with a modest, meditative, and powerful performance, juggling tender emotion (ample flashbacks to time with her kid) with exhausted exhilaration. No matter what, she’s quiet, potent, real. She says less to say more. This could’ve been sci-fi fluff, and it’s not. She’s tremendous to watch.

Jeremy Renner plays a (relatively distant) supporting role, and he’s great too — bringing some early scientific enthusiasm to the mission, and generally playing the sounding board for Adams’s ideas. Forest Whitaker is stern but fair as an Army colonel trying hard to balance the demands of his scientific team with more basic pressures like safety and military gamesmanship. He spends most of the film jammed between a rock and a hard place — which rings true — and we don’t envy him his position.

Arrival completely dispenses with the breakneck pace of many modern sci-fi films, choosing instead to take a breath, step back, and let the story and characters and stark natural scenery just be. It’s otherworldly not just in content but in pace, mood, and negative space. It’s all white smoke and rough stone walls and minimalism and wonder, yet miraculously avoids becoming the overwrought and self-important cluster-fuss that I just made it sound like. Solaris this is not, and director Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) apparently is just straight up good at everything.

Go see Arrival. It’s Interstellar meets The Day The Earth Stood Still wrapped in a fancy spa treatment for the senses. It’s the herbal tea of extraterrestrial films, tantalizing cerebral escapism for anguished coastal elites. I’ll stop short of calling this a true thinking being’s sci fi — there’s nothing particularly revelatory in its linguistics, for instance — but like every truly good alien film it claws at some deep human issues, and it uses a novel route to get there. And, of course, Amy Adams.

Haus Verdict: Amy Adams dazzles in this clean, measured, and soothing alien picture that’s not afraid to step back, to breathe, or to think. 

Arrival opens Friday November 11.

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