Movie Review: 'Arrival'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- With the arrival of Arrival, the classic-science-fiction subgenre expands by one title.
It's a knockout, a smart, challenging, riveting, surprising, and supremely satisfying drama that speaks to the head and the heart – in that order.
Arrival details a momentous space-creatures occurrence, our first actual contact with extraterrestrials as a dozen mysterious spacecraft land all across the globe, necessitating the establishment of an elite team of experts to investigate just what the heck they are intending to do.
Why are they here? What do they want?
The big fear is: Are we on the verge of intergalactic warfare? Or might this result in a global war as a result of the nations now playing the role of reluctant hosts not being able to negotiate a way to cooperate among themselves? And just how many human lives – and whose – are in imminent danger?
Amy Adams stars as Louise Banks, a world-class language and linguistics expert who, while mourning a child she has lost, is brought in by the government to help them figure out the intentions and translate the alien communications of the extraterrestrials who have just arrived on Earth.
Jeremy Renner plays Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist and mathematician who is also brought on board by one Colonel Weber, played by Forest Whitaker, who is in charge of the frantic effort to find answers to their many questions.
Their mission is to enter the invading-or-visiting creatures' egg-shaped craft and determine just why two huge heptapods have emerged from that craft, which is hovering over, among others locations, a field in Montana.
Impressive Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has concocted yet another somber, intense thriller (Sicario, Prisoners, Enemy, Incendies) that is visually and intellectually stunning, and filled it with arresting and sometimes mind-bending visuals.
And he somehow manages to make this admittedly demanding, cerebral movie, which is a slow-burn procedural in its first half, remarkably suspenseful, spookily tense, and startlingly, genuinely affecting in the third act, when it becomes deeply personal and moving.
Here's a movie that doesn't need souped-up action to thrill.
The script by Eric Heisserer, based on a 1998 short story by Ted Chiang entitled "Story of Your Life," offers up a puzzle to be solved and poses big questions while exploring intricately heady themes – such as, without giving anything away, time and grief and love and loss and the definition of humanity -- most of which are less than apparent in the early going.
The powerhouse, career-best lead performance by Amy Adams can't help but lock down an Oscar nomination for her – it would be her sixth, following nods for Junebug, Doubt, The Fighter, The Master, and American Hustle.
Her leading lady is assured and appealing, layered and complex, persuasively brilliant and naturally commanding, vulnerable but imposing.
So we'll translate 4 stars out of 4 for a superbly crafted science-fiction offering aimed at a thinking and feeling audience. Few movies in any genre rival Arrival.
