Arrival Review
Lots of younger directors are looked upon now as future greats, and one that people have been eyeing more recently is Denis Villeneuve, whose past two films, Prisoners (2013) and Sicario (2015) very much impressed me with great performances, dark and moody lighting and two great stories. Now comes Arrival, and again Villeneuve boasts a great cast and a terrific story, but with this one, I wasn’t quite as impressed as the last two times. Sure, we get standout work from Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, and the technical craftwork is outstanding, but I just wasn’t quite as wrapped-up in this one as I was in the two former films.
So for those who don’t quite know the story, Amy Adams is a Berkley professor of foreign languages and is called upon by Forest Whitaker, who plays a US colonel, to help lead the team of linguists in decoding an alien language. You see, the whole world is in a panic because twelve alien ships have just landed on Earth and nobody knows what to do. So Adams travels to the one that’s landed in the US, in the quiet lands of Montana, of all places, and tries to communicate with the aliens and learn their language with the help of Jeremy Renner, a scientist and a good foil for Adams, as it turns out. It’s always fun to watch Hawkeye from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Lois Lane from the DC Expanded Universe work together.
Anyways, I won’t go into too many more details because I walked into the movie cold, having seen the trailers maybe once or twice, and the experience and not knowing every last plot point was one that I seldom get anymore, so in all fairness, if you are reading this and haven’t seen the trailers and are interested in going, I won’t tell you how the plot shakes out after roughly the first third of the movie. All I will say is this: the first half really impressed me, and the second half just plain confused me. And actually, this was kind of a welcome element. Again, sci-fi pictures, in particular, are rarely in this form. We usually get alien films that are all about aliens coming down hell-bent on killing every last human they meet. I won’t say if that is the intention of the alien beings in this film, but the thinker’s-man feel of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) came to mind easily, and perhaps what I really reacted well to was the sense of awe and wonder when we first see the ship, the interior of the ship, and the aliens themselves. We rarely get a moment like this in film anymore. And surely I must name another Spielberg film, Jurassic Park (1993), which also came to mind because I think we all remember how impressed we were the first time we saw the film and the scene where Jeff Goldblum, Sam Niell and co. see the dinosaurs for the first time. While Arrival doesn’t quite reach that level, it sure came close.
While I might sound like I loved the film with the exception of a little confusion, let me re-iterate just how badly confused I was. I always pay very close attention to films, and I saw Arrival the same day as I saw The Accountant, which has a twist I saw coming but the audience I was with did not, and it’s very rare that I have to ask another person’s opinion or look up more info on the movie afterwards to figure out the plot points or something. After the film was over, I couldn’t help myself but to look on Wikipedia and read the plot again. Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer have crafted a film that I enjoyed and will probably end up seeing again, but I have to say that the joy I got out of the first half was instantly lost when I was constantly scratching my head for the second half. I seriously think I scratched enough to get blister on the back of my head.
I have to re-iterate also just how great the technical aspects were, though. The cinematography by Bradford Young, the talented man who also DP’d Selma (2014) and A Most Violent Year (2014), and whose work was perhaps the best part of Pawn Sacrifice (2015), should reap his first Oscar nomination with this film, and there are gorgeous shots from beginning to end. Also great was the unconventional score by Johhann Johannsson, who worked with Denis Villeneuve on both Prisoners and Sicario, and that might be the one element of the film that will keep ringing in my ears with several of Young’s shots filling my memories. It’s a great pairing that I’d love to see happen again.
I guess that’s about all I can say about Arrival, then, without going into spoiler territory and getting everybody who’s just looking for a quiet non-spoiler review pissed at me. The first half is reminiscent of a Spielberg classic in the best way possible, but almost all the joy and entertainment the first half gave me was instantly taken away by the structure of the second half. While a lot of people have instead given credit for this to Heisserer and Villeneuve, I feel if you’re leaving the viewer behind and making them do homework to catch up to them, they did their jobs poorly in some aspects. Still, for those of you out there who are tired of seeing the same-old rehash of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” or Independence Day (1996), Arrival has something different to offer. Just be prepared.
My rating: 8/10.
