In cinemas November 10th!
Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is an expert in linguistics who is haunted by the tragic death of her young daughter. She mopes from her lonely home to the university where she teaches seemingly with as little human interaction as possible; but on finding her classroom nearly empty one morning she soon learns the news that strange craft from another world have descended upon Earth and obviously everyone is a bit caught up in the excitement and/or fear of the situation.
Dr Banks seems relatively unmoved though and happy to watch from a distance until Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) shows up at her door looking to recruit her as a translator for the incomprehensible communications the military have managed to establish with the mysterious visitors. She pairs up with Ian (Jeremy Renner), a mathematician, and the two of them set out to decipher the alien language and figure out just what these travellers want whilst the rest of the world squabbles on the brink of war over what to do about them.
This film is very much my kind of science fiction. I love big sprawling sci-fi as much as the next nerd but this kind of small scale soft sci-fi is definitely something I can’t help but enjoy, and in fact this movie hits very closely to another fandom of mine, H.P. Lovecraft. Yes I’d say this is the closest we’ve ever seen to a modern day Lovecraft adaptation, and that includes any movie that’s actually directly based on his works.
If I’ve lost you, H.P. Lovecraft is the creator of the Cthulhu mythos and wrote a wide range of stories that are technically fantasy horror but more often than not read like surrealist science fiction, treating magic and the unknown like sciences we don’t understand yet, but not in a lazy Marvel way, more in a highly thought out complex way. He allowed his works to exist in the public domain, taking no copyright, because he wanted people to use his ideas and basically anything in this genre is probably influenced by him in some way.
Dr Banks seems relatively unmoved though and happy to watch from a distance until Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) shows up at her door looking to recruit her as a translator for the incomprehensible communications the military have managed to establish with the mysterious visitors. She pairs up with Ian (Jeremy Renner), a mathematician, and the two of them set out to decipher the alien language and figure out just what these travellers want whilst the rest of the world squabbles on the brink of war over what to do about them.
This film is very much my kind of science fiction. I love big sprawling sci-fi as much as the next nerd but this kind of small scale soft sci-fi is definitely something I can’t help but enjoy, and in fact this movie hits very closely to another fandom of mine, H.P. Lovecraft. Yes I’d say this is the closest we’ve ever seen to a modern day Lovecraft adaptation, and that includes any movie that’s actually directly based on his works.
If I’ve lost you, H.P. Lovecraft is the creator of the Cthulhu mythos and wrote a wide range of stories that are technically fantasy horror but more often than not read like surrealist science fiction, treating magic and the unknown like sciences we don’t understand yet, but not in a lazy Marvel way, more in a highly thought out complex way. He allowed his works to exist in the public domain, taking no copyright, because he wanted people to use his ideas and basically anything in this genre is probably influenced by him in some way.
;Arrival' definitely is under this influence, this is high concept stuff and once the full understanding of that kicks in and we begin to see all the pieces fit together it transcends well beyond it’s humble beginnings. But whilst it might take a moment to wrap your head around these details the film does linger on the reveal a little longer than necessary, which is actually the films only real problem. Don’t get me wrong I liked this film a lot and loved seeing all the secrets come together, but the movie does meander and seems to get distracted with backstory and asides that don’t appear overly relevant.
So the movie pads it’s run time with Dr Banks taking a bit too long too process everything, but it’s still really interesting and she isn’t being slow on the uptake so much as she’s in absolute shock and awe. Buried in that a subplot about some of the soldiers supervising them freaking out and deciding that maybe the aliens need a dose of violence to show them whose boss disappointingly hits it’s climax and then just sort of goes away, and maybe a little of the Dr Banks show could have been sacrificed to flesh out these elements.
Having said that this is definitely Dr Banks story, for more reasons than I can reveal here, and without giving too much away it all pays off in the end. I’d love to discuss this further but it would take far too long and spoil the entire premise of the movie. If you can’t tell this movie was a pretty easy sell to me, it hits several of my pre-existing fandoms, but still trust me that if you like high concept sci-fi you’ll get that a good dose of tension and intrigue as well, though you may wish the movie was a half hour shorter.
So the movie pads it’s run time with Dr Banks taking a bit too long too process everything, but it’s still really interesting and she isn’t being slow on the uptake so much as she’s in absolute shock and awe. Buried in that a subplot about some of the soldiers supervising them freaking out and deciding that maybe the aliens need a dose of violence to show them whose boss disappointingly hits it’s climax and then just sort of goes away, and maybe a little of the Dr Banks show could have been sacrificed to flesh out these elements.
Having said that this is definitely Dr Banks story, for more reasons than I can reveal here, and without giving too much away it all pays off in the end. I’d love to discuss this further but it would take far too long and spoil the entire premise of the movie. If you can’t tell this movie was a pretty easy sell to me, it hits several of my pre-existing fandoms, but still trust me that if you like high concept sci-fi you’ll get that a good dose of tension and intrigue as well, though you may wish the movie was a half hour shorter.
Review by Kristian Mitchell-Dolby.
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