ARRIVAL

ARRIVAL

          Ever since Stanley Kubrick’s ponderous, pretentious epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, back in 1968, the science fiction film, too often the object of highbrow sneers, acquired a certain dignity.  All those wonderful old B flicks about invaders from outer space and flying saucers manned by hideous creatures from distant planets bent on the destruction of mankind evolved into more, occasionally thoughtful explorations of those popular subjects, alien encounters, robots, time travel, and the future.  Some movies with similar aspirations to high art include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and AI Artificial Intelligence; Steven Spielberg directed all three, and the third derived from a planned Kubrick adaptation.

The concept of the alien encounter, whether in a mission from Earth, as in Aliens, or by extraterrestrial visitors to this planet, provides probably the most important and most common subject for science fiction.  Those visitors vary between the benign and helpful, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still, or much more often, frightening and hostile—The Thing From Another World, Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Puppet Masters, Independence Day, etc., etc., etc.  One of the major problems in that encounter, the difficult process of mere communication, the need to know the intentions of the visitors, forms the central preoccupation of the new science fiction film Arrival.   

Instead of the usual flying saucers (thanks, Roswell, New Mexico) crewed by the little green men beloved by alien abduction veterans, in Arrival the spaceships are huge half domes that hover on edge, twelve of which have landed in various places all over the world.  Their crew—the movie shows only two creatures—resembles gigantic octopuses, though with seven tentacles and no apparent eyes or mouths.  Led by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), the army sets up an expansive military village around the ship, and links up with similar constructions at the other locations in other countries.  Weber enlists Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a professor of linguistics, to find some way of communicating with the visitors.

As usual in science fiction films that deal with alien encounters, the puzzle presented by the visitors creates a dangerous conflict in the reactions of the various countries, including the United States.  While some, in the scientific community of course, want to find out all they can about them—where they came from, how they got here, what do they want, and so on--many frightened government leaders and their military forces want to attack them, even threatening nuclear bombs.  Louise Banks and her physicist colleague Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) naturally want their research to continue as far and as deep as they can conduct it.  That division of interpretation and purpose leads to the most important crisis in the movie.

She and Donnelly undergo the difficult preparations for ascending in a gravity-free tunnel and a possibly poisonous atmosphere inside the space ship to confront the aliens through a transparent wall.  The creatures “speak” by squirting a kind of ink in circular patterns, which through the sort of fascinating process that film shows so well, the linguist manages to decipher.   Whether valid or not, her explorations of possible meanings, the charts she creates, the solutions she reaches all share their own inherent appeal. 

Her own process of enlightenment grows out of the belief that learning a new language actually changes the human brain; as a result, she begins to share some of the thinking of the aliens and to participate in their peculiar sense of nonlinear time.  She even experiences physical changes, some connected to the notion that learning a new language in some way rewires the brain.  Her contact with the extraterrestrials enables her to communicate with other humans in ways she doesn’t even understand.  Through flashbacks and flash forwards, the movie shows the merging of past, present, and future, demonstrating the nonlinear nature of time, so that the linguist in effect paradoxically “remembers” the future.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Arrival succeeds on many levels, fusing the personal history and context of its protagonist with the desperate struggle to avert violence and, best of all, simply to learn as much as possible.  Even in its use of familiar subjects and themes of the genre, the film’s version of the alien encounter presents some entirely new meanings and possibilities, with a refreshing reliance on the intellect and some compelling ideas about linguistics itself.  Along with its intelligent use of some inventive material, its massive space ship, the huge military encampment surrounding it, the extremely unusual creatures, the large cast, the special effects all combine to place it among the most memorable science fiction films.  It may well become a classic.