ARRIVAL (2016) ****

Sometimes it’s the notes you don’t hit that matter the most.  We’ve seen what happens in Arrival many times before, dating way back to the ‘50s.  Aliens come to Earth trying to communicate with mankind.  Almost immediately, the world is thrust to the brink of war, if only because one slight misunderstanding could unleash an unknown form of extraterrestrial fury.  

Arrival is a much more intimate, thoughtful, and thought-provoking film than many of its ilk.  Instead of focusing on the global implications of an alien invasion, we focus (mostly) on one woman and her task to understand the alien’s language.  She is a linguistics professor who is assigned to meet the aliens firsthand and decipher their cryptic language, which looks like rings a coffee cup would leave behind on an end table.  

Amy Adams gives a great performance as the heroine.  Many scenes are nothing more than her and octopus-like monsters that spurt ink and run around like that sculpture Catherine O’Hara made in Beetlejuice.  Somehow, she’s able to not only pull it off, but make you feel something for both her and the aliens.  You see, it’s up to her to make head or tails of the alien’s symbols and decide whether or not their intentions are friendly.  

It’s slow going too.  The process, I mean, not the movie.  Director Denis Villeneuve takes his time to allow Adams and the aliens to build trust and eventually, an understanding.  Yes, the movie does have the usual subplots that are normally found in the genre.  There’s the typical stuff involving the Russians and Chinese potentially plotting war against the aliens, but it feels more like he’s paying lip service to the genre demands than caving into them.  This is a movie more interested in establishing a line of communication with other worlds than starting wars with them.  It’s closer to Close Encounters of the Third Kind than Alien, minus all the stuff with Richard Dreyfus playing in his mashed potatoes.   

I wouldn’t dream of revealing just how Adams… uh… arrives at her conclusion regarding the aliens’ intentions.  That’s kind of what makes it memorable.  Sure, it sort of owes a debt to Contact, another movie in which an Oscar winner talked to aliens, but it works just as well, if not better here. 

In short, Arrival is one of the best alien movies I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s further proof that Villeneuve is the real deal.  I can’t wait to see what he does with Dune.