The Brilliant 'Arrival' Uses Alien First Contact To Hit Some Deeply Human Themes

12 November 2016 | 10:00 am | Anthony Carew

A bit of an unexpected, last-minute coup, but this may just end up being the actress's year.

ARRIVAL

Denis Villeneuve has had a long, strange, wonderful career, from his bizarre, whimsical art-movie larks (1998’s August 32nd On Earth, 2000’s Maelström) through to his harrowing, war-torn scorched-Earth thrillers (2010’s Incendies, 2015’s Sicario). With the arrival of Arrival, it feels like his filmography has been a long, slow build, moving towards his crowning achievement. Arrival is an instant sci-fi classic, a thoughtful portrait of alien first contact that, slyly, tilts into a profound picture of temporality and the human experience.

For anyone who’s ever rolled their eyes at the dramatic shortcuts of ‘universal translators’ or fresh-off-the-spaceship aliens speaking theatre-worthy English, Arrival marks a fabulous tonic.

Amy Adams —it’s officially Amy Adams Week, if not Amy Adams’ year, with the concurrent opening of the great Nocturnal Animals (scroll on down!)— plays a linguist who is whisked off to try and translate the language of newly arrived, seemingly benevolent aliens. Based on Ted Chiang’s short story The Story Of Your Life, the film identifies the first problem of first contact: the slow process of communication, and the pitfalls of miscommunication.

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For anyone who’s ever rolled their eyes at the dramatic shortcuts of ‘universal translators’ or fresh-off-the-spaceship aliens speaking theatre-worthy English, Arrival marks a fabulous tonic.The film’s first order of business is the work of translation, where even getting to the point of asking, “Why are you here?” involves endless groundwork, complex processing, and an understanding of alien thought and language.

For a popcorn blockbuster to so turn itself over to linguistic concepts and theoretical thought-experiments, a crowd must first be won over. And, sure enough, the early scenes are the stuff of glorious, Spielberg-ian spectacle. Twelve towering black spheres materialise around the globe, sending humanity into wild panic. Adams is approached by Forest Whitaker’s commanding army officer, and whisked away in a helicopter at night, in a tumult of noise, blinding lights and eerie darkness. She’s funnelled through the bustle of prep —mission briefs, injections, hazmat-suit fittings, radio comms— in sequences shot, largely, in behind-the-head tracking shots that invite us to assume her perspective. Then, Adams and Jeremy Renner (a theoretical physicist in the house!) are taken off to the alien ship, and into the unknown.

There, we ascend into the glittering visions of visionary space movies; all zero-gravity and heavenly light; the marriage of eggheadery and artistry recalling everything from 2001 to Interstellar. The crew is trussed head-to-toe in high-tech protective wear, but also takes up a canary in a cage, a symbol of old-fashioned danger, mankind’s eternal ally in journeying towards the abyss. And, finally, we see them (“Am I the only one having trouble saying ‘aliens’?” Adams asks): floating, squid-like creatures, imposing and otherworldly. After the reveal, Villeneuve cuts quickly away, keeps them unknowable, but as the work progresses, so are the aliens made familiar; Renner dubbing them Abbott and Costello, intergalactic cultural exchange afoot.

We come to know their species as Heptapods, for their seven appendages. And, via the (movie-makin’) magic of montage, we learn that their language and writing are entirely separate forms of communication; their writing conveying meaning, rather than denoting sounds. Their ‘sentences’ don’t run forward or backward, but are non-linear —built into complex circular calligraphic symbols, painted in gaseous black ink in the air— which betrays the non-linear way they experience existence.

Eventually tension is drummed up when confusion over an alien word —Are they saying weapon or tool? Do they understand the difference?— provokes bellicose reactions from Chinese, Russian, and American military; and fear and panic-mongering among politicians. This is a familiar sci-fi trope —aliens arrive, but the only monsters are humans— but, in a week in which fear and panic-mongering swayed the most horrific election result in living memory, these themes feel all too trenchant. The film’s big moral lesson is taught through the prism of communication: Arrival not just about maintaining a civil dialogue with aliens, but among ourselves; as political nation-states, workplace employees, lovers, individuals, humans.

But, like all great cinema, Arrival is, at essence, a film about time. Cinema is the medium most intimately connected with time, our very experience of the world, and, here, Eric Heisserer’s script honours that notion, plays with that phenomenon. With Adams’ increasing exposure to the alien language, her brain starts rewiring itself; she, too, learning to communicate —and, then, to experience— in non-linear ways. This makes the film an unlikely big-budget exercise in linguistic relativity, even if it, eventually, cedes to a picture of temporality. It does so with an aching final-act revelation that is at once mind-widening chin-scratcher hypothesis and savage emotional pay-off; a movie about aliens becoming an artwork aching with humanity. In Arrival, as in life, time is at once tragic prison and experiential miracle, every instant —past, present, future— a memory worth treasuring.

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

In Nocturnal Animals —Tom Ford’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2009 debut A Single Man— Amy Adams walks past an artwork that may be 2016’s most audacious act of literalising a theme on screen: its large canvas emblazoned, simply, with the word ‘Revenge’. An art-dealer clad in haute couture, an armour of make-up/jewellery, and a thick air of wealthy ennui, Adams can barely remember even buying the painting. She’s never slept well, and has been sleepwalking through life; her marriage to Armie Hammer —an actor so generically handsome he seems CGI’d— having grown as cold as their imposing modernist palace, an ivory tower high in the hills of Los Angeles.

Yet, when Adams sees the ‘Revenge’ canvas, this time, she sees it anew; having been shaken from her middle-aged malaise by the arrival of a manuscript, a to-be-published novel written by the “back in graduate school” ex-husband she hasn’t seen in 20 years. As the package arrives, it comes loaded with symbolic gesture, too.When Adams opens it, she cuts her finger; within is a story that will make her suffer.

When she finally begins reading the manuscript —abandoned by philandering Hammer, alone in her opulent sarcophagus— she’s drawn into the world of the narrative; the experience of it changing her. The story within a story is, here, a genre-movie within an art-movie, a tale of suffering, savagery, and vengeance whose far-west Texas setting is a million miles removed from Adams’ moneyed LA milieu of galleries and dinner parties, of Michael Sheen in a lavender blazer and Andrea Riseborough in ’70s Afro-futurist cosplay.

In this book —called, too, Nocturnal Animals, and dedicated to Adams’ character— Jake Gyllenhaal plays a meek, emasculated male out on the road with his wife (Isla Fisher, put to good use as an Adams doppelgänger) and daughter (Ellie Bamber). They’re run off the road in the middle of nowhere by a gang of dudes lead by the peacockin’ Aaron Taylor-Johnson and passive-aggressive Karl Glusman. Eventually, Gyllenhaal is stranded in the desert, and his wife and daughter end up dead. With salty local cop Michael Shannon whispering sweet vengeance in his ear, Gyllenhaal turns to tracking down the men who did it.

Whilst the story-within-a-story is a revenge-thriller, the manuscript itself is a work of revenge. Adams is so shaken reading it because she realises that her ex-husband drew on the suffering he felt from the end of their marriage; wrote it in defiance of her lack of faith, her cruelty, as a work of retribution. It’s dedicated to her, but bitterly; its beauty both seducing and wounding her, in turn.

In the film’s most affecting scenes, story and story-within-story intermingle with memory, and we see Adams and Gyllenhaal (pulling double duty as ex-husband, thus conflating the twin narratives further) at various points in their relationship: as young lovers, empowered newlyweds, unhappy spouses. Adams is torn between her history, her obsession with the book, and her suddenly alien daily life; spooked by the violence of the text, and the violent intrusion of the past; made, finally, to suffer for long-ago sins.

The premise of the story —reading a book changes a woman’s life!— lends itself to the page, and, sure enough, Nocturnal Animals is an adaptation of a novel by Austin Wright. It’s called Tony & Susan, and whilst that title is more banal, the distinction of its co-billed characters is key: Susan is the woman reading the story, but Tony is the character within it. At times, to visually create this connection, Ford is left to rote cross-cutting: Susan is in the bath, so is Tony; Susan is in the shower, so is Tony; Susan can’t sleep, nor can Tony. But, the interjection of memory —where a gun-shot in the story cuts to a crackling fireplace log in the now, then a crackling fireplace log in the past— allows the film to be less metronomic back-and-forth, more cantabile flow.

Ford manages to turn these overlapping narratives into an artful swirl; to make something that summons the feeling of (stop me if you’ve read this before) temporality, the way we exist only in one time yet, mentally, are torn between many. It’s a film whose literal savagery is within quotations within quotations, but whose emotional savagery sits near to the surface, feeling raw, bitter, true.