BDirected by Denis Villeneuve Starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion remains one of my favorite films of the 21st century because it so perfectly mixes the rational and the emotional. In its well-researched and coherent vision of what a deadly pandemic might look like, it perfectly balances the what-if exercises of the head with the human drama of the heart. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival attempts to replicate that finely-tuned mixture, as applied to an alien encounter. It eschews Soderbergh's global approach for a localized one in which a team of US scientists tries to establish contact with the visitors. The events of Arrival feel ripped from the pages of a history book, and that verisimilitude should make it a can't miss for this lover of competence-porn in many of his favorite films. However, Arrival is more heavily tilted towards the head, a problem I've had with all of Villeneuve's films. Of his English-speaking works, this film contains his baldest pitch towards emotionality, but like Prisoners and Sicario, there's a chill in spite of the considerable filmmaking powers on display.
Where Contagion cast several experts who approached the pandemic in different ways, Arrival puts all its eggs in Amy Adams' basket. Her linguist, Dr. Louise Banks, is shuffling through the world, going through the motions after an opening montage that ends with her young daughter's death from cancer. The only thing that can penetrate her tunnel vision is an interstellar event, though she's still the last one to notice when twelve alien ships land at different points across the globe. Drafted by the military and the CIA to attempt to communicate with the aliens, she and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) ascend the gravity-defying vessels and meet the mollusk-like creatures who look nothing like humans, a tremendous boon to the film's credibility. Drawing from historical instances when vastly different civilizations met for the first time, Banks is slowly able to both decipher the aliens' strange writing and make herself be understood. While she's making progress with the newly-christened 'heptapods,' other countries are at a standstill, or worse, interpreting threats.
For much of its runtime, Arrival depicts a technical process, and Villeneuve crafts a technically extraordinary film to match. He's worked with some of the best cinematographers in the business, particularly Roger Deakins, but the director's collaboration here with Bradford Young likely tops it. The look of Arrival is flawless, aided by the sleek design of the heptapod ships. Reflective and onyx-black with an elegant ovoid shape, the one that Banks works with sits nestled in a mountain valley, first revealed amongst rolling fog in a breathtaking shot. Ascending the craft is a mind-bender, as it creates its own gravity past a center point, and Young finds a seamless way to integrate a change in orientation. Aurally, Johann Johannson's electronic score is a stark relief against Max Richter's plaintive On the Nature of Daylight piece, used at the beginning and end of the film to great effect, almost single-handedly bringing the pathos that the film otherwise isn't quite able to get across.
To go with the look and sound of the film is a story that understands the power of discovery. Banks gets several Eureka moments, and Adams, reliably excellent, communicates both the joy of winning that one intellectual battle and the restraint of knowing that the war continues. Eric Heisserer's script, adapted from a book by Ted Chiang, is able to keep the revelations from being drowned in opaque techno-babble while still allowing Banks to be brilliant by slotting in Forrest Whittaker's Colonel Weber as an audience surrogate for her to explain things to. Admittedly, this is a device that gets a little old, as he keeps presenting her with skepticism and a reluctance to go forward, and then she tells him why he's wrong, and he gives her permission to go back up into the ship, but it's a passable, utilitarian solution in search of a more cinematic one.
What she's explaining is the best part of the film, as if the viewer is suddenly a fly on the wall to the first meeting between Europeans and Native Americans. Arrival is utterly preoccupied with communication, such that whatever Donnelly is teaching to/learning from the hectapods is unclear. They communicate with intricate circles and patterns, with each idea sent from one of their tendrils as a puff of smoke that curls into a loop with specific blotches and branches coming off it. Seeing Banks decipher all this is thrilling, as are the next dilemmas that come from whether or not she's interpreting correctly. Much of the global drama comes from whether a loop segment means either 'weapon' or 'tool,' with some nations coming to different conclusions than others. These kinds of tiny misunderstandings, also addressed in Martin Scorsese's Silence, reverberate throughout history, and Arrival prompts the viewer to think about how easily such a mistake can be made.
Where the film starts to break down is in its reaching for deeper meaning. Like Interstellar before it, the film overcompensates and leans into a more maudlin interpretation, perhaps to offset the more clinical aspects. There's nothing as bad as Anne Hathaway's dreadful 'love is the most powerful force in the universe' speech from Christopher Nolan's space epic, but in attempting to close its loop, Arrival goes for an ambitious ending that feels like a bit too much. It has a timely, globalist optimism on a planet-wide scale, which is typical of space-related films, but it also has a time-bending aspect that seems to conflict with the internal logic of the film. This is a film where I ultimately found myself shocked for not feeling stronger about it, and much of that is likely tied up in the head-scratcher of a final act. A second-viewing might make the film land harder, and when Arrival is such an impressive undertaking in so many other ways, revisiting it is an easy proposition. B
For much of its runtime, Arrival depicts a technical process, and Villeneuve crafts a technically extraordinary film to match. He's worked with some of the best cinematographers in the business, particularly Roger Deakins, but the director's collaboration here with Bradford Young likely tops it. The look of Arrival is flawless, aided by the sleek design of the heptapod ships. Reflective and onyx-black with an elegant ovoid shape, the one that Banks works with sits nestled in a mountain valley, first revealed amongst rolling fog in a breathtaking shot. Ascending the craft is a mind-bender, as it creates its own gravity past a center point, and Young finds a seamless way to integrate a change in orientation. Aurally, Johann Johannson's electronic score is a stark relief against Max Richter's plaintive On the Nature of Daylight piece, used at the beginning and end of the film to great effect, almost single-handedly bringing the pathos that the film otherwise isn't quite able to get across.
To go with the look and sound of the film is a story that understands the power of discovery. Banks gets several Eureka moments, and Adams, reliably excellent, communicates both the joy of winning that one intellectual battle and the restraint of knowing that the war continues. Eric Heisserer's script, adapted from a book by Ted Chiang, is able to keep the revelations from being drowned in opaque techno-babble while still allowing Banks to be brilliant by slotting in Forrest Whittaker's Colonel Weber as an audience surrogate for her to explain things to. Admittedly, this is a device that gets a little old, as he keeps presenting her with skepticism and a reluctance to go forward, and then she tells him why he's wrong, and he gives her permission to go back up into the ship, but it's a passable, utilitarian solution in search of a more cinematic one.
What she's explaining is the best part of the film, as if the viewer is suddenly a fly on the wall to the first meeting between Europeans and Native Americans. Arrival is utterly preoccupied with communication, such that whatever Donnelly is teaching to/learning from the hectapods is unclear. They communicate with intricate circles and patterns, with each idea sent from one of their tendrils as a puff of smoke that curls into a loop with specific blotches and branches coming off it. Seeing Banks decipher all this is thrilling, as are the next dilemmas that come from whether or not she's interpreting correctly. Much of the global drama comes from whether a loop segment means either 'weapon' or 'tool,' with some nations coming to different conclusions than others. These kinds of tiny misunderstandings, also addressed in Martin Scorsese's Silence, reverberate throughout history, and Arrival prompts the viewer to think about how easily such a mistake can be made.
Where the film starts to break down is in its reaching for deeper meaning. Like Interstellar before it, the film overcompensates and leans into a more maudlin interpretation, perhaps to offset the more clinical aspects. There's nothing as bad as Anne Hathaway's dreadful 'love is the most powerful force in the universe' speech from Christopher Nolan's space epic, but in attempting to close its loop, Arrival goes for an ambitious ending that feels like a bit too much. It has a timely, globalist optimism on a planet-wide scale, which is typical of space-related films, but it also has a time-bending aspect that seems to conflict with the internal logic of the film. This is a film where I ultimately found myself shocked for not feeling stronger about it, and much of that is likely tied up in the head-scratcher of a final act. A second-viewing might make the film land harder, and when Arrival is such an impressive undertaking in so many other ways, revisiting it is an easy proposition. B
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