Critics reviews

Arrival, the new film written by Eric Heisserer from Ted Chaing's short story "The Story of Your Life" is directed by Denis Villeneuve. But first and most of all, it is written. And even more, it is writing about language that makes it clear that language matters, that language is in fact the key to everything... This is a movie par excellence of adaptation, a work of sharing, which happens to be a key theme in the story's geopolitical narrative.

Arrival, as emotionally haunted as it is, also offers the biggest ray of sunshine to fall on a Villeneuve hero(ine). And the triumph of the film—what makes it one of Villeneuve's most thematically satisfying features, if far from the most airtight plot—is that the optimism and the darkness don't cancel each other out but find a aesthetic symbiosis. This is an unsettling crowd-pleaser, the saddest happy blockbuster in the Oscar spotlight.

As a sci-fi drama about international cooperation and defusing violence, Arrival values thinking over ray guns, renegotiating the terms of battle between sensitive eggheads and macho soldiers typical of alien invasion films. Adams's super-translator shouts in Mandarin to convince the Chinese military she can see through time now that the aliens have revealed its secrets to her, an outburst and a plot twist that make sense if you're high and caffeinated.

The details are irresistible, as Arrival's unusually interested in the process of communication—at least for a while... For all of the film's considerable craftsmanship, one keeps tripping on the pop-cultural derivations and signposts. At times, Villeneuve suggests M. Night Shyamalan without the neurosis and self-consciousness.

It's a movie of philosophy as much as adventure. It not only respects Chiang's story but takes it further. It's more explicitly time-travelish. That is to say, it's really a movie about time. Time, fate, and free will.

This is not "pop-science" at all. This is real reading: this is critical inquiry based on close reading. Banks, it turns out, is a really good teacher, not necessarily of hard-science linguistics — she never really explains her computational methods — but of something more solidly, less sexily humanistic. Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) and Donnelly are her students; so are we.

Novelty, motivation, and clarity seem to me essential considerations for a filmmaker who wants to play with time and the viewpoint shifts that often come with it... Arrival succeeds in creating its particular engagement with the audience by tackling my three tasks. Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer innovate in handling time, and they in turn carefully motivate the device and find ways to make it clear to the audience. Today I want to consider how this all works.

In a way, Arrival may be the sci-fi blockbuster answer to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. It doesn't so much dwell on the big themes of time and memory, as lay them out in broad strokes over the story of one woman's life... The film's emotional core rests squarely on Adams and her ethereal blue eyes. Arrival is a chronicle of her. Louise's alternating fear and boldness carry this movie, right from its lyrical opening.

The movie is a model of faithful, transformative film adaptation. It's also an exploration of a humble and brave ontological position that, in the aftershock of the Presidential election, feels as sublime, unfamiliar, and vaguely oracular as the iron-gray spaceships that hover in the film.

It's a thing of beauty. If you're in need of a shot of hope, a movie that acknowledge's humanity's gross collective stupidity while holding out some possibility for improvement, it may do you some good. Denis Villeneuve makes beautiful images, perhaps tending to exploit shallow focus a little TOO much, but in doing so he uses it in unexpected ways, sometimes throwing the whole subject of the shot into an artful blur.

Any soppy "human interest" angle is offset by a sober style—although Villeneuve's sobriety can feel a little trowelled-on. And the key human presence in the story is steely enough: the concerned, candid face of Amy Adams, gazing at the enigmatic other behind the glass not with dumb awe but as if she's trying to figure it all out piece by piece, a methodical semiotic sleuth.

By turns inviting and opaque, Ms. Adams turns softness and quiet into heroic qualities, keeping her voice low, modulated, and using stillness to draw you near. In a nice reversal of how many puzzlers work, the movie becomes more fragmented the closer that Louise gets to figuring out why the aliens have arrived, what they want from Earth and why. Increasingly, her steadiness becomes the very foundation for the narrative, which serves its meaning beautifully.