Arrival — Review

Twelve shell-shaped alien vessels descend from the heavens and hover just feet above the Earth in different locations across the globe. An expert linguist played by Amy Adams is whisked away by the US Military (led by Forrest Whitaker) to an alien sight in Montana. On the ride there she is introduced to a scientist (Jeremy Renner) who tells her the thesis for her book is wrong, and that science, not language, is the fundamental starting point for human civilization.

With days before military forces around the world could potentially escalate the situation to inter-galactic warfare, these two must try to learn the aliens’ written language from them so as to understand their purpose here. This is a thinking person’s sci-fi film about communication and our perception of time. ‘Arrival’ was written by Eric Heisserer and directed with great care by Denis Villeneuve, who did last year’s excellent ‘Sicario.’ I confess I needed a few days, some discussion with friends, thinking about the movie and reading about it to get me to this point, at which I think I’ve sort of wrapped my head around the last act of the story. For a beautifully made genre flick that dares to be different I say it’s well worth the effort.