Arrival Review The First Contact Film That Made You Think Instead Of Shoot

Arrival Review: The First Contact Movie That Made You Think Instead Of Shoot

Here’s the thing though – when I think of first contact movies, explosions and guns usually come to mind. Space jets, laser guns, bulky military armor and humanity beating aliens within an inch of their lives until they realise we aren’t playing games and leave Earth alone. That’s what growing up in the eighties taught me science fiction movies would look like if aliens visited Earth.

Independence Day taught us to blow things up real big and rebuild in Darkness Falls! both War of the Worlds remakes taught us humanity always makes the same mistakes when faced with technologically superior foes. A seemingly endless slew of pointless alien invasion B-movies taught us the solution to any extraterrestrial problem Earth suffers is more explosions and bigger guns. So when I first heard about Arrival I’ll admit I was a little dubious going in. Denis Villeneuve directing another alien invasion flick?

The thing is though – I was wrong.

Premiering November 11th 2016 in the United States (Wikipedia), Arrival took a genre I hadn’t seen actively engaged with intellectual challenges since the late nineties and leaned fully into them. Instead of asking the question we’ve been asking since alien movies were cool – “How will we fight them?” – it dared to ask “How will we communicate?” Everything that followed from that question created not only the best science fiction film of the last few years, but one of the best films period.

Instead of blowing things bigger and louder than they came in (thank you again, Independence Day! ), Arrival brought audiences an thoughtful exploration of ideas around linguistics and human nature wrapped up in one of the best science fiction stories since – well, since other Arrival ideas were floating around. The movie actually trusts you, the audience, to sit through ideas that some might consider wonky about how language shapes thought and assumes you’ll stick with it because what you learn about the characters as they navigate an extraordinary situation is worth your time. It dares to expect intelligence and curiosity from audiences in ways modern blockbuster filmmaking rarely does. As Spielberg would say, that’s dinosaurs magic right there.

TLDR? Arrival earned its place among not just the greatest science fiction flicks of the 2010s, but among the best films of that decade. It went big on ideas few mainstream films cared about anymore and was rewarded with praise from audiences who still appreciate movies that make you think. Based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, Arrival hit Venice Film Festival screens on September 1st, 2016 Italy (IMDb Release Info) before beginning its wide release and was met with critical acclaim. The movie scored a hearty 94% on Rotten Tomatoes (RT), with a Metascore of 81 (Metacritic). Audiences had still come for movies that made them think.

## Communication is the Real First Contact Problem

Humans are gifted with language. You know it, I know it, we all know it. However, Arrival dares to posit the idea that communicating with aliens isn’t gonna be easy just because we can talk. Twelve unidentified shell-shaped spacecraft suddenly appear in everyday locations across the globe, touching down quietly before rising up and hovering silently near where they landed. Governments all over the world take understandably immediate defensive measures, scrambling military assets to defend against what can only be described as an invasion of Earth.

Until, that is, scientist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams giving that perfect balance of intensity we know and love from her) figures out we’re being communicated to, not attacked.

One of the things I really appreciated about Arrival is how seriously it takes the process of linguistics. Louise doesn’t just raise her hands and magically understand heptapod thanks to convenient plot twist science. Instead she learns to communicate like real linguists study foreign languages, starting with basic information; identifying words for Earth, themselves, Louise, trying to figure out descriptive words and shape the language. There’s repetition, there’s a lot of conversation as she slowly deciphers not only the language but the context around it. There’s mutual misunderstanding on both sides as they try and learn as quickly as possible while wary humans attempt military solutions to what is very much a communication problem.

As you may have guessed from the title, the beings within those cool looking shell ships are heptapods, seven-limbed creatures who speak through written language. Octopodes have eight limbs and Homo sapiens have two arms and two legs. Why wouldn’t intelligent life from beyond our world have some number of appendages other than those we consider conventional? The heptapods communicate through circular symbols each comprised of intricate loops and whorls that make them feel eerily alive. With zero prefix in their syntax meaning there is no inherent understanding of chronological order to the symbols themselves. Arrival leans hard into linguistic and scientific ideas most movies would gloss over in service of plot, and it works wonderfully.

This emphasis on linguistics and approaching the alien language scientifically invests a lot of credibility in Louise as she works tirelessly to not just learn heptapod, but teach humans how to speak it. When she’s shown the symbols and worked to vocalize them based on best guesses at pronunciation Adams sells every moment. From exasperation at missteps to wonderment at breakthroughs, watching Louise learn felt authentic. Villeneuve and writer Eric Heisserer clearly understand linguistics, or studied enough to get it right on screen. When aliens show up in your movie and you get the.language.right, that’s worldbuilding at its finest.

The logograms themselves are fascinating to watch develop. Louise projects images onto the symbols hoping the heptapods will make the connection, expanding their vocabulary through patient, respectful communication. It’s all incredibly exciting to watch because she’s actually learning not as a plot device to enable the next stage of the movie, but because that’s how linguists would breakthrough in real life.

Watching countries from around the world impatiently reach martial conclusions and ready weapons platforms while Louise and team work through masses of difficult, poorly understood heptapod vocabulary speaks volumes about the attitude of humans towards non-human intelligence. They don’t get that we’re trying to talk! Murderous gunfire doesn’t seem like the obvious solution.

Arrival gets its hands dirty with how human nature can easily turn first contact from intellectual exercise to genocide if those in positions of power believe military action is better solution. I respect that a lot.

## Seeing the Future Doesn’t Make Life Any Less Worth Living

Okay, this part killed me.

Louise is not just learning heptapod, she’s learning to experience time as they do.

Throughout her experience communicating with the heptapods, Louise experiences memories she has not yet lived. Small moments with her daughter not in her past, but rather in her future. The movie takes place non-linearly, with scenes we eventually learn are not moments from Louise’s past but glimpses of life she will someday live.

The time in Arrival isn’t your run-of-the-mill sci-fi bullshit time travel where you go back and fix stuff or kill your baby grandfathers. This is transcendence of normal human limitations of consciousness brought on by learning heptapod. As she’s become able to speak and understand them perfectly, Louise gained the ability to perceive time as they do. All at once.

You’ve got to watch it to understand just how emotionally devastating it is when you put all the pieces together and realise Louise is experiencing her own future. Every conversation with Hannah, every laugh, every hug. These moments are relived by Louise as if she’s remembering them, but she’s living them for the first time.

I remember crying through this scene, rewinding it multiple times because I wanted to believe there was another explanation. Maybe she could go back and change it, save her daughter the pain of a shortened life. But that’s not how life works. Sometimes terrible shit just happens and the only thing we can control is how we deal with it. In learning to accept her future, Louise also accepts her life.

She sees it all but that doesn’t make living it any less valuable. Sure, she knows hardship and tragedy are coming but she also knows joy, love, warmth. To sidestep pain by refusing to experience life is to punish those you love just as deeply. Better the good with the bad than nothing at all.

You spend the last 20-odd minutes of Arrival rooting for Louise to figure it out, to do whatever she can to change this future she’s been shown. And then you watch it happen anyway.

I’ve watched this movie enough that I knew something was coming. I’ve read analyses that detail timelines and showcase clips identifying when those future memories occur. Nothing can prepare you for rolling those clips together and realising none of it was flashbacks at all. Louise isn’t remembering these moments with her daughter, she’s living them for the first time.

Incredible.

## Beautiful Presentation on Approachable Sci-Fi Scale

Arrival doesn’t feel like mainstream filmmaking, at least not in a conventional sense. Yes, it’s the kind of blockbuster supported by major studios, released widely and has grossed over $200 million at the box office (The Numbers). It was nominated for Adapted Screenplay at the 2017 Academy Awards(Academy Awards). It’s popular enough that everyone and their mothers (hi mom!) thinks they know the concept behind the film in spite of its release being several years ago at this point.

And you know what? That’s fine with me.

Arrival has a ton of heart and some seriously fascinating concepts to chew on but knows when to step back and let the characters experience moments in all their raw emotion. There’s real love and loss on display here in ways we don’t often get from big-budget cinema. Hell, we don’t often get from cinema period. This could have easily been a story about discovering groundbreaking scientific phenomena and insisting it blow your mind and eyelid atoms. Instead, we get a look at family and how human connections help us weather storms we don’t anticipate.

Visually, Arrival is beautiful without going full-on goofy science fiction ridiculousness that comments on itself (looking at you Star Trek Into Darkness). The ship themselves are giant flying objects that really do look like oversized snails floating in the sky. They’re sleek and feel unnatural despite how unmovingly they sit when stationary, their exteriors reflecting Earth like a funhouse mirror. Sleek design that suggests technology far beyond our comprehension without trying to make them look like misshapen human technology.

Communication between humans and heptapods takes place in the centre of the ship through a clear barrier that separates them. The aliens themselves float gracefully within their craft, waving their seven tentacles at problems we haven’t yet discovered. When communication is successful they use translation technology to convert Louise’s voice into near real-time written symbols that fill the room with scrolling heptapod script. Gorgeous stuff.

Even scenes set within Louise’s daily life are grounded by cinematographer Bradford Young’s muted colour palettes and use of natural lighting wherever possible. Every interaction feels lived in and tactile rather than a film featuring props and sets. You believe Louise’s world and that commitment to realistic visuals bleeds over into how you approach the obviously science fiction elements.

The movie as a whole reflects this structure. Scenes aren’t always clearly defined as past or future but exist together as Louise experiences them. It’s a challenging style of filmmaking most audiences wouldn’t accept, but Arrival earns you keeping up with its complex style.

## Arrival in Context

Arrival wasn’t made in a vacuum. The world in 2016 was shifting beneath our feet.

In 2016 anxieties around globalization, immigration, and strained communication between global powers threatened to boil over. Arrival smartly situated itself around challenges scientists and civilians face when presented with unknown factors, aliens in this case. How do you communicate with beings that have no conception of how we view and process language? How do you react when faced with the unknown and realise your best intentions may not be enough?

Thank god for scientists willing to look long and hard into existential threats to figure out why little green men just keep landing on our front lawn.

Made with a $47 million budget (Box Office Mojo Budget), Arrival showed you could make major studio-level science fiction that isn’t self-serious action movies or funny person-in-spacesuit stories. Its $24 million dollar opening weekend (Box Office Mojo) and eventual worldwide gross of $203 million proves moviegoers were hungry for this sort of thoughtful, crowd accessible science fiction. That same audience brought it Oscar recognition because, again, it wasn’t afraid to lean into the literary ideas of its source material.

In many ways Arrival has shown its chin to blockbuster filmmaking. It leaned into big themes usually reserved for low-budget arthouse cinema and earned both critical and commercial success for doing so. That same year Luc Besson’s The Wife became a monster hit on a similar scale. Microbudget indie films were selling tickets, making audiences want more. While Arrival might not have directly led to smaller-budget sci-fi films earning major studio consideration, its success surely didn’t hurt.

Arrival can’t be blamed for Donald Trump becoming president of the United States but there are some thematic parallels in how humans react to a threat they don’t understand. Arrival is no Kindergarten Cop but there’s an allegorical lesson to be learned in patience and communicating with those who don’t see the world as you do.

It feels lazy to point at Arrival and say “See! This kind of movie works!” But film audiences deserve more smart science fiction that expects them to be paying attention. Movies like Arrival are few and far between right now, and we need more of them.

## Arrival is Science Fiction at its Thoughtful Best

Arrival understands both science fiction and movies as communication between artists and audiences. It realizes the only things separating you from the heptapods are language and knowledge, and treats that gap with respect. As Louise works tirelessly to collapse that distance by teaching humans how to speak their language, you do too by learning alongside her.

Arrival is also beautifully human. At its heart this is a movie about family and how the people you love keep us going when everything around us is falling apart. Nothing about encountering alien life fundamentally changes that.

We’re seeing big budget alien movies that accomplish some of what Arrival did. But none have inspired me to write an entire blog post about how mind-blowing I think it is the way Adams slowly deciphers heptapod. For a movie that dropped just two years ago, Arrival has definitely stood the test of time.

Remember that feeling? The idea that science fiction could challenge you, make you think, and actually reward you for paying attention? Movies that explore thought-provoking concepts through their characters rather than drowning you in exposition? Movies that made you feel wonder and amazement at the endless possibilities of the universe?

Arrival remembers.

Quinn Mercer

Quinn Mercer is Dystopian Lens’s nostalgic soul, dedicated to all things retro in the world of sci-fi. With a passion for ‘80s pop culture, classic video games, and practical effects, Quinn’s writing is filled with personal anecdotes about growing up on the golden age of sci-fi. His conversational style transports readers back in time, while also critically reflecting on the state of modern sci-fi. A collector of VHS tapes and action figures, Quinn’s love for old-school media makes him the perfect guide to revisiting the classics and comparing them to today’s high-tech remakes.