Arthur C Clarke famously said there are just two possibilities: that we are alone in the universe, or we aren’t, and both are equally terrifying. The first terror is harder to put on film, but director Denis Villeneuve brings the second to life with this freaky and audacious contact sci-fi – and makes it something other than terror. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer has adapted the novella Story of Your Life by the SF author Ted Chiang; he brings to it a Shyamalanesque lilt, and cleverly finesses the inevitable problem of how to end this kind of story: whether there is going to be any kind of departure. The movie skirts the edge of absurdity as anything like this must, but a forthright star performance from Amy Adams convinces you that something that could be silly is actually fascinating and deeply scary. This is a close encounter of the engrossing kind: smarter and more dreamily exalting than recent, disappointing movies such as Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
As is now expected with this kind of film, the protagonist is a flustered, bewildered civilian expert, brusquely pressed into service by the military, which has got the spacecraft surrounded in the short term. Adams plays Dr Louise Banks, a world-renowned professor of comparative linguistics with nothing in her life but her work. A bunch of army guys led by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) show up on Louise’s doorstep, demanding she come with them to help translate the apparently linguistic sounds coming from the aliens who have just landed. Why, you ask, did they not approach Noam Chomsky, with his understanding of “deep structure” in language? Perhaps Prof Chomsky did not care to help America’s military-intelligence complex.
At any rate, Louise’s liaison is the flirtatious Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), a military scientist who, in a stereotypical and fallacious way, equates his masculinity with science. Unknown to anyone, there is a secret tragedy in Louise’s life: a lost child, dead of cancer in her late teens. Her attempts to communicate with the aliens cause painful, illuminating echoes in her consciousness.
If a lion could speak, said Wittgenstein, we would not understand him. Does the same go for aliens? Spielberg solved this issue elegantly in Close Encounters by making the form of communication a five-note musical phrase, ending questioningly on the dominant. Villeneuve’s solution is more literal. The aliens have a code that – a bit ridiculously – Louise finds herself more or less able to crack. It is her human intuition, vulnerability and spontaneity that finally enable her to reach out to the visitors.
Villeneuve very effectively creates the pre-contact ambient panic in society, when news of the aliens’ arrival gets out. Dr Banks walks into the faculty car park where someone backing out just bashes into someone else. A low-level smash in the cinematic scheme of things, but convincing in its suppressed panic and abandonment of politeness. Do these visitors come in peace or not? The movie cites the result of indigenous Australians being visited by Captain Cook and the white Europeans in the 18th century. Tactfully, it does not mention the more obvious issues of Africans or Native Americans.
The sequences that precede the revelation are where the flavour is: the pre-alien foreplay where the genre has yet to morph from conspiracy paranoia to full blown sci-fi. Villeneuve doesn’t disappoint with his sequences of eerie and skin-crawling strangeness: great scenes of the tense, bustling military bureaucracy in the secure zone adjacent to the spaceship, with everyone wearing the big Michelin-man hazmat suits, actually not unlike the one ET gets poignantly zipped up in. On her way in, Dr Banks asks Col Weber who was the guy she just saw being carted off in a medevac. “Not everyone can process this experience,” he replies, grimly: an indirect challenge to us, the cowering audience.
By coolly switching focus to political intrigue and betrayal within the human ranks, Villeneuve keeps a grip on his story and creates ballast for its departure into the realms of the visionary and supernatural. He also prepares us for the film’s sense that language itself, freed from our usual sense of its linear form, might be more important than anyone thought.
Arrival is a big, risky, showy movie that jumps up on its high-concept highwire and disdains a net. And yes, there are uneasy moments of silliness when it wobbles a little. But this is an exciting film, with a great performance from Amy Adams, all about the romance of other worlds, and this one.
