Arrival (2016)

Arrival (2016)

7/10

Starring

Amy Adams

Jeremy Renner

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Imagine a movie about Aliens visiting our planets.

Right now, I’m sure many of the movies of Alien Invasion are crossing your mind, if you are much older movies like Alien (1979) and Predator (1987) will have passed through your mind. The gore that came with these movies, like in one of the Alien (1979) franchise movies with the scene of an alien bursting out of the man’s rib cage.

Arrival is different, these Alien race visited the plant earth and landed at twelve different locations. A language expert was then invited to see if she can communicate with them to find out what they wanted and if earth should be ready for a military response.

Arrival takes you down a path that is different from the regular gore and fighting that comes from the regular Alien movies, although there are movies where different Alien races came to help the earth, and this is one of them.

Arrival does not waste time passing on some flimsy introduction, it gets right to the point right from the beginning. Louise (Amy Adams) starts off the film by holding her daughter in her arms after delivery in the hospital. Many fast forwards after, we see the child grow and die due to some incurable disease.

Now I’m going to introduce a little spoiler, those scenes in the beginning are not introductions to the Louise character at her present state of existence. What this means requires you to watch the movie.

Louise is a lecturer whose specialty is languages and interpreting them. At her lecture she notices that only a few students were at class, a lot of phone ringing led her to discover that, twelve extraterrestrial spacecrafts have appeared at twelve locations across Earth.

She was recruited by the U.S. Army to come help translate the language of the Aliens.

Louise went with them, but upon noticing how impossible it could be to translate a Language without any form of aid. She decided to start by giving out information to the Aliens in a way to get them to share and understand each other.

This same thing is happening at the different Alien ship sightings, but each country is using a different method to communicate with the Aliens.

One communication session had the mention of weapons, and that started something which led the humans to take guard to fight against these Aliens, other countries also got this communication and they formed an alliance to attack and destroy the Aliens if possible.

But Louise suspects that this is a misinterpretation and she now has to do everything within her power to stop what could be a potential chaos.

Arrival is interesting and its own way of depicting an Alien visitation maybe very different from what we are used to and there may not be the whole fighting or pending world damage, but the movie delivers in the thrills. Kudos goes to the director for the pacing and the cinematographer for the many ways the film depicted its encounter.

Here is a good movie I encourage you to take the time and see.