Denis Villeneuve makes dark, and scary movies about things like adultery, the personal ethics of torturing a person, the violent drug trade on the Mexican border and the existential and beautiful sentimentality of the ever expanding beauty of life and the incredible nicety of raising a chil…..wait what just happened there? As joking goes that’s not a very good one, but it just about gets across the surprise that is Denis Villeneuve's Arrival: 1.This isn’t the type of movie that he usually makes, 2. HIs calculated style should not work with an overly sentimental tone without feeling like he’s trying to copy Spielberg (see moments of Interstellar), and 3. This movie is hiding the sentimentality in the middle of it all wrapped up in a spoiler protected bow, which does make it pretty hard to actually talk about what the movie is about. The short answer is that translator, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), possibly fueled on by the recent death of her child at the hands of an unstoppable disease, is called upon by the US military to a remote base located at the base of a large alien spacecraft. Eleven other spacecrafts have landed around the world and other countries aren’t acting quite as well too them. Now, on it’s face that’s a pretty cool story, and this part of the movie works because it feels incredibly grounded and personal into Adams’s perspective. Want to make your movie a globetrotting effort that stays in relatively the same place throughout the entire movie? Ground your movie on an almost miniscule protagonist compared to the rest of the world and hope that that comparison and the existential trappings your movie is using, as well as the simple but spellbinding effects can smooth out the edges .Arrival, does so too. Louise is perfectly played protagonist, as Adams turns in wonderful work and eventually the scale of the movie finds itself feeling both out of our grasp but also intensely intimate. This at first feels slightly off, as those tones shouldn’t fit together, but throughout the first two acts the composure breaking alien imagery (seriously guys there’s a rugged and dark emptiness to the alien ship that is mystifying), actually intense real world reactions by some soldiers to the aliens, and almost over staged, charming dialogue in conversation does a nice job of smoothing out some of those rough edges. Turns out all of this is necessary once the twist of the story actually comes in i.e. I’M ABOUT TO SPOIL THIS AND YOU SHOULD NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE, IT”S GETTING A 9. GO SEE IT. See, after a voiceover section in the middle of the movie that shows Banks and the other scientist working (a very sympathetic Jeremy Renner) out how the alien language works, the aliens start to talk about giving Adams and other countries around the world a weapon. This spooks China and other Eastern governments who decide to mobilize, and as Louis attempts to keep the countries from using weapons, Villeneuve slowly starts to feed us the truth. One thing that’s always been strong in his films is he allows the audience to figure things out rather than just telling them. So, that tangent aside, the alien’s “weapon” happens to be their language, which allows them to look at time non-linearly. Suddenly, we get the sense that Adams, now learning it is also getting a view into time, and that the daughter stuff we thought was motivating her character is actually not even in existence yet. That’s one hell of a twist, but it’s also a genius inversion that allows the same plot point to have emotional bearing on both the beginning of the movie and the end. The stakes soon become focussed on how Louise can use this newfound ability to stop the world from falling apart but more importantly whether or not she will allow the sad reality that she knows is coming (her daughter living and then dying from a debilitating disease) to happen. This sounds like the type of ending that would probably piss off a lot of people, but the movie promises it in the earlier tone of epic yet intimate. Eventually, the melancholy longing that comes with allowing a life, with all it’s good and bad moments imposes take over the film in a strong finish. Arrival is a film one could imagine Spielberg making now as a rebuttal to his more cynical 70’s alien fare in that while Spielberg split families apart in an effort to create a broader realization of life and how one would deal with beings from another planet, Arrival brings them together. Both versions are not half bad I give Arrival a 9 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |