“Arrival” pairs a slow pace and mysterious supernatural aspect with a cynical view of the human race and the consequences of venturing outside of our own comprehension. Director Denis Villeneuve and writer Eric Heisserer have created an unsettling yet thrilling take on the plausibility of extraterrestrial life and explored the depth of extrasensory perception.
As the movie begins, we see a child who grows up and passes away as a teenager from a terminal illness. Her mother, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), accompanies her and voices over an explanation of time and its appearance in life.
Upon returning to her job as a linguistics professor, Louise turns on the news to discover that twelve spacecrafts have landed in different areas on Earth. She is then called in by U.S. Army Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) to communicate with the aliens onboard. The seven-legged aliens, “heptapods,” share their language with Louise and her teammate physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner).
During the peaceful exchanges between Louise and the aliens, many countries’ military commanders begin to back out of the experiments, seeing the aliens as a violent threat. As time runs out on Louise’s experiments before the spaceships are destroyed, she rushes to uncover the secrets of the “heptapods” in relation to her daughter, her past, her future, and her nation, using fragments of a language unknown to any other human.
“Arrival” presents many aspects of time and other dimensions in a thought-provoking way. The movie’s twists and hidden pieces of information are confusing, but aid in constructing the mystery. In a manner similar to “Inception” (2010), “Arrival” pulls at the limits of human knowledge of time, space and our universe.
Along with the movie’s distortion of time, its use of extraterrestrial beings creates an unsettling effect. The “heptapods” are seven-legged beings with black bodies and extended, star-shaped “fingers”; they communicate with wispy ink-like circle figures, which project from their arms. Ted Chiang originally created the idea of these aliens in his short story, “The Story of Your Life and Others.” The introduction of aliens in a film as well-made as “Arrival” was fascinating — particularly seeing the country’s response to the invasion. In the movie, upon the arrival of the spacecrafts, people became crazed by the unknown. The debate over whether or not the aliens appeared for war grew to the point of riots and unnecessary violence.
Villeneuve creates for his viewers a film that pits humanity and science against each other. As the race between the desire to discover the “heptapods’” language and the pressure to wage war develops, people’s tolerance and morality are tested. While some people believe it is necessary to reach out to other-worldly races to understand themselves, others believe in safety and protocol, maintaining a cynical view of the unknown. “Arrival” shows the difficulties in understanding and explaining the need for exploration: no one can know everything unless they venture from what they already know.