WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAIN SPOILERS!
Arrival is one of those movies that builds up to
a huge twist at the end, and how you felt about said twist is
ultimately how you felt about the movie. I for one think that this
movie is fantastic and everyone should see it regardless of whether
the twist works for them or not, but we can't really gauge that
without actually discussing it. So I'm going to discuss the movie as
a whole first, then put up a spoiler warning before I get into the
twist so you know where to stop. We good? Good. Now on with the
review.
Language is a funny thing. It's the most complex system
ever designed by the human brain, a means of written and spoken
communication that only we are capable of, and yet it is the backbone
of all civilization. One of the things that made it so hard for us to
bridge the gap of foreign societies has been our attempts, and in
some cases failure, to translate our wildly different languages. A
simple misunderstanding could spell disaster. Wars have been started
because something got lost in translation. (Just ask Arthur Dent.)
That is the dilemma faced by the cast of Arrival, an alien
invasion film where the difference between war and peace leans on
learning a whole new means of communication.
Alien starcrafts have mysteriously appeared dotted
around the globe. Nobody knows where they came from or what they
want. To figure this out, the American government hires linguist
Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to board one of the ships to learn their
language, accompanied by mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner)
and U.S. Army Colonel Webber (Forest Whitaker). But the process is
slow and the world powers start getting antsy and threaten to turn
their armed forces on the aliens if they don't find an answer fast.
This movie
comes to us courtesy of Denis Villeneuve, a director who I'd argue is
the more genre-savvy spiritual successor to David Fincher. As evident
by films like this, Sicario, Prisoners and Enemy,
Villeneuve has a knack for slow-burning character dramas that delve
into the human nature under dark circumstances while daring audiences
to figure out what's really going on behind the curtain. In Sicario,
an idealistic FBI agent has her beliefs challenged when she finds her squadmates are willing to play just as dirty as the drug cartel
they're trying to take down. In Prisoners, a man goes to
horrific measures to find his missing daughter. Arrival isn't
nearly as dark as those movies, but it still explore some serious
themes, in this case our fear of the unknown and our attempt to
understand the unfathomable. The aliens, while clearly octopus-like
in form, remain shrouded in fog behind a glass barrier. They travel
in ships where the laws of Earth's gravity do not apply. Their
written language is completely foreign to any other on Earth. And
later on we find out that what we had been seeing up until then
wasn't even their entire form.
But even though the
film hangs the fate of the world in the balance of learning about
these foreigners, this is ultimately Louise's story. Amy Adams brings
a lot of gravitas and emotional vulnerability to this character, as
she struggles with memories of a tragic past that disrupt her focus,
but we'll get back to that in a minute. That's not to say she carries
the entire movie herself. Jeremy Renner does a pretty good job of
bringing a dry sense of humor that saves the movie from being overly
serious, and Forest Whitaker does well as a colonel who isn't a
trigger happy moron, but realizes the importance of getting the job
done.
But to really get into
the meat of why this movie is so great, I have to talk about the
twist, and unfortunately I can't do that without getting into spoiler
territory. Bottom line, this is one of the best movies of the year
and you should see it as soon as you can, but if you want to
experience it with fresh eyes, I suggest you close the review now. If
you have seen the movie or don't care for spoilers, just keep on
reading.
SPOILERS
AHEAD!
So
the main reason the aliens have arrived is to teach us their
language, thus providing us with a universal form of communication
and theoretically uniting us all. They communicate by squirting out
this ink-like substance that form intricate rings, each of which is
its own complex sentence. The sentences are circular rather than
linear like our own language and leave no room for misinterpretation.
They also perceive time in a circular manner and can see into the
future in the same way that we can remember our past. Their language
is so hard-wired that anyone who learns it will gain this ability,
which exactly what happens to Louise. See, the movie is peppered with
flashbacks to Louise's past, particularly surrounding the life and
death of her daughter. Except Louise never had a kid, and what we
thought were memories of the past were actually Louise seeing into
her own future. Not only is this a tremendous feat of screenwriting,
but it also helps to punctuate the movie's overall themes. How are
our choices affected when we know the outcome? Are they really
choices if we know the outcome? It's like Louise asked herself (and
vicariously, the audience) at the very beginning, “If you could see
your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things?”
END
SPOLIERS.
So yeah, Arrival
definitely deals with some really out there ideas, but if you're
looking for something that'll stimulate your mind, this will more
than satisfy. It sure did for me and this movie has a spot secured on
my year end top 10 list.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment