Arrival
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Produced by Shawn Levy, Dan Levine, Aaron Ryder & David Linde
Screenplay by Eric Heisserer
Based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang
Starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma
Imagine, if you will, a place beyond space and time, a place where it is just you and your Netflix, alone in a darkened room while Covid-19 growls and lurches down the empty streets outside, and you’re bored off your tits.
So you scroll down the endless selection screen, looking for, well, something. There’s never anything on, grumble, mutter.
Finally, you see a movie that looks like it could possibly have potential. It says “SyFy” next to it, so you know there’s a good chance that ten minutes in, the mad scientist is going to say something like, “General, it seems impossible, but that ray turned all the neutrinos in the universe positive!” Yes, that certainly would be a plot complication, but you wouldn’t have 82 minutes plus 78 minutes in ads to explore that complication. Universe go boom, all fall down. Very sad. And since you graduated from elementary school, you would turn the damn thing off and spend the next three hours playing mah jong.
So I started watching this movie I had never heard of with somewhat low expectations.
It’s a first contact movie, which usually means happy ‘splody fun times, and maybe the White House will get blown up again.
By about 15 minutes in, we’ve met the main protagonist, a lady linguist role formerly occupied by Jodie Foster. We’ve met the squirrelly but intrigued scientist, played in the past by Jeff Goldblum. The stuffy stern American general was played by…Forest Whitaker? Hold up. “King of Scotland” Whitaker? Interesting casting choice!
And it turns out, a brilliant one. As were Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner for the first two roles mentioned.
The science is solid, the dialogue intelligent, and the aliens aren’t out to destroy the planet or To Serve Man. They’re as curious about us as we are about them, and their hologrammic language is as brilliant a depiction of alien communication as I’ve ever seen.
Netflix does come up with some good SF movies, and this was one of their better ones. SyFy has, shall we say, a more mixed reputation, and I realized that this didn’t come from their in-house production company that specializes in deliberately campy genre flicks. No scenes of Wayne Pygram handing a fossilized tooth to a bumbling lab assistant and telling him, “Now remember, this must remain completely dry. If it gets wet, it will turn into a living tyrannosaurus Rex, because all the neutrinos are positive. Now drive my convertible 330 miles through this hurricane to my lab, and for god’s sake, don’t let it get wet!”
So I looked Arrival up. Made in 2016. Won a Hugo, and a Ray Bradbury. Eight nominations for Oscars, won one. Having seen it, I wasn’t surprised. Damn good movie.
I don’t know how that one got under my radar. I love good SF movies, and until lately they were rather hard to come by. Star Wars and comic book heroes don’t count, and Star Trek is a genre all off to itself.
Well, ok, so I’m late to the party. But yeah, this is a fine movie, and well worth watching as you listen to your neighbor coughing.
Now on Netflix.