Mankind is doomed. We're hard-wired to be selfish, paranoid, prone to violence. We like war, among us humans or with the alien. What may redeem us, however, is compassion, generosity, language, love, grace, and so on -- all those teary-eyed emotions that is sometimes called "lyrical" in a movie. Or simpler, what may save us is a last-act manipulation of time and plot points, a wily trick nonetheless pulled off smoothly through the moving performance by Amy Adams.
When an alien ship lands in Montana -- 11 other vessels, in the shape of an all-black sliced egg shell, arrive at 11 other locations around the world -- linguist Louise Banks (Adams) is recruited by the US army to establish a communication with the visitors. Her job is to determine the purpose of the visit, and she plans to find out by learning the alien language -- a spray-paint of abstract calligraphy -- during her visit in the gravity-twisting chamber of the vessel. Aiding her (he doesn't seem to do much) is scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). As the two scholars learn the writing of the seven-tentacled Heptapod extraterrestrials, the soldiers are jittery: Is this an invasion? China and Russia, also visited by the hovering monoliths, threaten to open fire. In short, humans always itch to shoot at something we can't understand. Seriously, can we let just humanity professors decide the fate of mankind instead of the trigger-happy military?
Arrival is directed by Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Enemy and Prisoners, and whose next big thing this year is Blade Runner 2049). It's a science fiction drama that hinges on the cerebral allure of cosmic philosophy and the Grand Question of Humanity in the vein of, say, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, bloated and befuddling. Its respected grandfathers, of course, are Tarkovsky's Solaris, Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey (the black ship is an updated version of the black monolith), or even Speilberg's Close Encounter Of The Third Kind. We can even cite Contact, with Jodie Foster stargazing and wonderstruck, but honestly we can't remember anything much from that film.
The wonders of alien visitors have faded in the past three decades because cinema has given us too many of them -- too many unimaginative wars of the worlds between species. When the space station waltzes to Strauss in 2001: Space Odyssey or when the mother ship lands in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, we almost floated out of the cinema. Now an alien stopover is a routine. Our journey to the far shores of the galaxy is a tedious been-there-done-that.
So Arrival, which aims to touch rather than to excite, looks inward. The film about aliens, it proposes, is in fact a way to look at the human race, the good and the bad in us (mostly the bad). The dramatisation concerns Louise's and Ian's attempt to decipher the alien writing, and Villeneuve brings us inside the ship's black box, empty save for a translucent screen (like a cinema screen?) which separates the Octopus-like aliens from the scientists. They teach the visitors English vocabulary while the extraterrestrials spray their own words, a complex grammatical and semantic visualisation, back on the white screen. A bond of sort is formed between Louise and the aliens. In one swoop, the film wants to celebrate written as well as visual languages as the foundation of civilisation and, well, humanity.
We stay transfixed at the soft-hued cinematography, more melancholic than transformative. I don't know if it's inevitable when you're making an intelligent film that you end up taking your material too seriously (Kubrick did that too, but man, it's Kubrick). We also stray into the Terrence Malick territory, with the absence of God nevertheless: As Louise toils away trying to talk to the aliens, the film intercuts into her dream vision in which she sees her daughter in moments of joy and sadness, the little girl in all her sunny childhood and the tragedy that befalls her.
In all, this is what we call a noble film. But while Arrival picks out big themes and ideas and ask serious questions, the need for a resolution and "message" kicks in the machine of the plot so calculated and jarring -- I can't reveal more obviously -- that it feels less human than programmed. It turns out that what saves mankind is not our emotional maturity and our ability to achieve grace; what saves us is an intervention, or more precisely the script. It feels like a soft landing for a film that prods life-changing premises. Most viewers may choose to ignore that when Adams, as Louise, is completely absorbing here as a woman in the world of men -- not a "strong woman" as the cliché goes, but someone who believes in language and feeling while everyone else believes in weapon and reason. If she's an Oscar contender, it's from this film and not Nocturnal Animals. Should we let linguists decide our fate instead of the military? With Louise in charge, yes.
Arrival
Starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker. Directed by Denis Villeneuve.
