Worlds in Collision

Arrival is nominally a work of science fiction set in the present about how the world would react if alien ships appeared and we had no way to communicate with those on board or judge their intentions. Ordinarily at this point I’d give you some plot description and talk about the characters and such, but I don’t want to do that, because it’s really best if you go into this movie fresh. Almost anything I’d say would function as a spoiler, because director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter
Eric Heisserer have done such a masterful job of turning what initially seems to be a relatively conventional story into an existential fable that is anything but.

It is also difficult to write properly in any detail about Amy Adams’s lead performance. Adams and her character, in a very real sense, are Arrival. She’s in every scene, in almost every shot. We see everything that happens through her character’s eyes. We hear her thoughts. The camera is often placed right by her, or over her shoulder, so that her perspective is our perspective. Throughout much of the film’s running time, Adams seems uncomfortable with a part in which this wonderfully exuberant actress is called upon to play a controlled and emotionally shut-down academic linguist.

But when you realize what is actually going on in Arrival, it becomes clear that what Adams has been doing is nothing short of brilliant. Her work here deserves comparison to Mia Farrow’s classic performance in Rosemary’s Baby, which Arrival resembles in no way except for how carefully it is constructed to hew to the radically subjective point of view of a single and very unsettled character. Like Rosemary, Louise of Arrival finds herself unnerved and off-kilter most of the time, and for reasons she can’t possibly imagine.

This is not a lighthearted picture. I’m not sure there’s a single joke or a single laugh in it, though there is a terrific moment when Louise is trying to explain to her military handlers how difficult communications can be without common terms of reference. She tells a story about Captain Cook arriving in Australia. He saw a marsupial, and asked what the name of the animal was. Kangaroo, the natives told him. But, Louise says, the word “kangaroo” meant “I don’t understand.”

She tells the Cook story because she’s trying to get her way on something—and she quietly confesses to a colleague that it’s not true.

The detail comes from the source material for Arrival, an intellectually fascinating 1998 short story by Ted Chiang called “Story of Your Life.” And yet, in this instance as elsewhere in the movie, Ville­neuve and Heisserer actually improve on Chiang’s storytelling—a rare accomplishment matched by relatively few film adaptations. Likely inspired by the French filmmaker Chris Marker’s mind-bending 1962 La Jetée—probably the greatest short film ever made, remade decently three decades later as the Bruce Willis picture Twelve Monkeys—Chiang hit upon a fantastic concept and worked through it intelligently but somewhat bloodlessly. The makers of Arrival have taken Chiang’s concept and surfaced a deep emotional wellspring that was present in “Story of Your Life” but which Chiang couldn’t quite reach.

You’re in for a wallop at the film’s conclusion, when the puzzle comes together. For once, the wallop is earned. This isn’t an M. Night Shyamalan twist but rather the surprisingly adult and morally serious exploration of a fundamental paradox: What does mortality mean? We know we’re going to die, and that our loved ones are going to die. What do we do with the time in-between? How do we use our time wisely or meaningfully when we exist with the knowledge of our mortality? That sounds pretentious, I know. But Arrival earns it. It’s the best American movie so far this year.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.