arrival movie review

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Challengers Link to Challengers
• I Saw the TV Glow Link to I Saw the TV Glow
• Música Link to Música

New TV Tonight

• The Veil: Season 1
• Hacks: Season 3
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz: Season 1
• A Man in Full: Season 1
• Acapulco: Season 3
• Welcome to Wrexham: Season 3
• John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in LA: Season 1
• Star Wars: Tales of the Empire: Season 1
• My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman: Season 4.2
• Shardlake: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• Velma: Season 2
• Them: Season 2
• Ripley: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1 Link to Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

All Zendaya Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

Video Game TV Shows Ranked by Tomatometer

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

The Most Anticipated Movies of 2024

Poll: Most Anticipated Movies of May 2024

• Trending on RT
• Most Anticipated TV of May
• Seen on Screen
• Zendaya Movies
• Play Movie Trivia

Arrival Reviews

Arrival is a work that resents the necessity of violence. However, the film ditches some of the meditative qualities of the bleakness-to-idealism dialectic of the album in favor of making a cold hard stand against war and those who clamour for it.

Full Review | Feb 6, 2024

The film not only discusses complex theories about time, but also exemplifies it by creating a circular sequence of events. Embarking on the mounting steps of Villeneuve’s hypnotic structure is assured to leave viewers spellbound.

Full Review | Nov 20, 2023

With “Arrival,” Villeneuve has hit full stride with a film that contains elements of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Spielberg, via influence rather than imitation or tacky aping. He is his own man, yet recognizes the genius that preceded his creative journey.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2023

A masterpiece of scifi films

Full Review | Aug 7, 2023

Leaves us with hope... One of the best sci-fi films of recent times without gunfights. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 6, 2023

Melancholy, mysterious and measured as it tracks the struggle to communicate with these alien creatures, Arrival is really about language and how it functions, how it shapes us and sometimes limits us, and how it can connect or separate us.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2023

Amy Adams’ transcendent portrayal of a linguist...

Full Review | Dec 21, 2022

I appreciated the intelligent science fiction, but also how the film steps beyond genre. It turned out to be far more intimate and thought-provoking than I ever expected. And all of that on top of the superb visuals, art direction, and score.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

The trippy events unfolding out of Heisserer’s screenplay tangle the puppeteer’s strings and play with narrative and filmmaking forces few are daring enough, and smart enough, to wield.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 14, 2022

Both cerebral and achingly emotional, Arrival sustains a message about hope and understanding for a better humanity that audiences may need right now.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 9, 2022

One of the most beautiful, emotional and original science-fiction films of the last decade.

Full Review | Nov 5, 2021

The best film of 2016. A motion picture that turns out to be far more focused on humanity than on otherworldly visitors, it's a transcendent viewing experience that gets under the skin and into the heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 18, 2021

Arrival just might be the overall best movie of the decade with the way it cleverly examines what we believe while simultaneously delivering a tense, gripping sci-fi story.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

Hypnotic and strange and beautiful - have I said beautiful fifteen times yet? Because it deserves that word no fewer than that many.

Full Review | Jul 2, 2021

An astonishingly beautiful film, both visually and emotionally.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 23, 2021

One of the finest, if not the finest, science fiction movie of the 21st Century.

Full Review | Apr 13, 2021

True to its theme, Arrival itself seems like a premonition of a more tangible event.

Full Review | Apr 6, 2021

A slow-burn thriller that is profound and beautiful. To say any more would spoil it,

Full Review | Feb 13, 2021

We'll always have power structures that are reflexively defensive, but Arrival reminds us many in prominent positions are committed to peace.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2021

If there was such a precedent, this film might be considered an alien encounter procedural.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 4, 2020

The Epic Intimacy of Arrival

The alien-contact movie, starring Amy Adams and directed by Denis Villeneuve, is the best film of the year so far.

Arrival , the remarkable new film by Denis Villeneuve, begins aptly enough with an arrival—though perhaps not the kind you would expect. A baby is born, and her mother, played by Amy Adams, explains in voiceover, “I used to think to this was the beginning of your story.” We see the girl’s life, in flashback—games of cowboy, arguments, reconciliations—as her mother continues, “I remember moments in the middle ... and this was the end.” We see the girl, now a teenager, in a hospital bed. Then we see the bed empty.

The sequence—a brief life encompassed in still briefer summary—is surely among the most heartbreaking since Michael Giacchino’s magnificently versatile waltz carried us through the “ Married Life ” segment of Up . And while at first it appears to be mere backstory for Adams’s character, it is in fact much more, perhaps the most crucial thread in Villeneuve’s intricately woven film.

Recommended Reading

Interstellar : A Preposterous Epic

Your Dog Feels No Shame

Who Wins When Cash Is No Longer King?

Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a world-class linguist whom the Army once asked for help with a Farsi translation. “You made quick work of those insurgent videos,” a Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) reminds her; “you made quick work of those insurgents,” she rebuts. The Army needs her help once again, although this time the work is decidedly more esoteric: Aliens have arrived on Earth in a dozen giant craft scattered across the globe, one of them in the wilds of Montana. Colonel Weber would like Louise to come with him, learn the aliens’ language, and ask them why they’re here. On the flight into Big Sky Country, she is introduced to her partner in this endeavor, a genial physicist named Ian Donelly (Jeremy Renner, looking relieved that no one expects him to lug around a bow and quiver).

Villeneuve clearly knows his Godzilla , and like Ishiro Honda he takes his time before revealing his leviathan. As the chopper bearing the scientists skims over the plains, the alien craft emerges, literally, from the mist: a 1,500-foot edifice of what looks like black rock floating weightlessly just above the ground, like a giant skipping-stone poised on one tip.

Accompanied by soldiers and technicians, Louise and Ian enter the craft by means of a square shaft in its base. Once inside, however, gravity releases them and then shifts 90 degrees, such that the shaft is now a corridor and one of its walls the floor. It is a dizzying moment for Louise and Ian, and no less so for the audience, like when Fred Astaire danced his way up the wall in Royal Wedding . As Ian responded to the sudden inversion with “holy fuck,” I was right there with him.

At the end of the corridor they meet their hosts, two giant, squid-like beings that float on the other side of a transparent barrier. Louise and Ian call them “heptapods” owing to their seven symmetrical tentacles, and name the two “Abbott” and “Costello,” because, well, why not? Efforts at verbal communication are unsuccessful, but written language proves more promising. From their starfish-like hands, the heptapods can emit swirling circles of inky gas, each one of them—as Louise concludes—a fully formed sentence with neither beginning nor end. Communication with the creatures moves slowly, but it at least begins to move.

Like Villeneuve’s recent films Sicario and Prisoners , the movie is at once evocative and mysterious. As events unspool, we can sense that—like Louise with the heptapods—we do not entirely comprehend them. (We are correct in this.) As she and Ian try to decode the creatures’ language, they are constrained in their efforts by Colonel Weber and, especially, a CIA agent named Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg). Until we know more of the aliens’ intentions—conquest? tourism? cup of sugar?—Weber and Halpern are greatly concerned that we do not accidentally teach them more about ourselves than we learn about them.

Moreover, there are geopolitics to consider. Eleven other craft hover elsewhere on Earth: Shanghai, Siberia, Sudan, Sierre Leone, and even a few places not starting with “s.” What if China or Russia makes a breakthrough with the aliens first and uses what it learns against the United States? What if shots are fired, bringing alien wrath down upon the whole globe? Already their arrival has enveloped America in a sense of dread and anxiety not seen since—well, this entire political season. Looting breaks out in the cities; Pentecostals self-immolate; talk-radio tough guys demand “a show of force, a shot across their bows.”

The look of Arrival is stately and elegant; its pace, sober and deliberate. This is Villeneuve’s first collaboration with the cinematographer Bradford Young, who shot my two favorite films of 2014 in A Most Violent Year and Selma . The score, by the frequent Villeneuve contributor Jóhann Jóhannsson, is multifaceted and occasionally spellbinding, not least when its low horns boom with menace, almost like an alien voice themselves.

The script is by Eric Heisserer, who cunningly adapted and expanded it from a short story by Ted Chiang. It’s tempting to describe Arrival as “thinking person’s science fiction.” And while I will not descend to such hokey nomenclature, there’s a reason you’ll probably see that phrase plenty in conjunction with the film.

It would be a disservice to describe how the plot unfolds any further, as Villeneuve releases information gradually and viewers will likely clue into the film’s true meaning at different points in its evolution. Suffice to say that Arrival is a “twist” movie, but the twist is more than a mere gimmick. Like Christopher Nolan’s Memento , it is central not only to the film’s narrative but also to its moral architecture—which, like Memento ’s, concerns itself with questions of time, memory, and human choice. This is precisely the kind of science-fiction movie, at once epic and intimate, that Interstellar tried (and failed ) to be.

The entire cast is strong, but Arrival is Adams’s movie from the first frame to the last. I confess that I initially thought that her gifts might be wasted on such space-invader fare, but the performance she gives is mesmerizingly open, by turns uplifting and sorrowful. If you are unmoved by the film’s conclusion, then you are made of considerably harder stuff than I.

As awards season gets under way, there are several promising movies visible hovering on the horizon. But for now, the best film of the year, ambitious in conception and extraordinary in execution, has arrived.

Advertisement

Supported by

Review: Aliens Drop Anchor in ‘Arrival,’ but What Are Their Intentions?

• Share full article

By Manohla Dargis

• Nov. 10, 2016

In what’s perhaps the first science-fiction film — Georges Méliès’s 1902 marvel “A Trip to the Moon” — a group of astronomers lands in the Man in the Moon’s eye. They’re soon taken prisoner by moon men, but a quick-witted astronomer clobbers the king and they escape, with one earthling vanquishing moon men with an umbrella. Humans have been zapping extraterrestrials ever since. It’s so easy to fight the unknown, at least in movies.

“Arrival” is a science-fiction parable in a distinctly more idealistic hopeful key than most movies in this genre, one in which the best solutions don’t necessarily materialize in a gun sight. It has a little action, a bit of violence and clenched-jawed jittery men. Mostly, it has ideas and hope, as well as eerie extraterrestrials who face off with a soulful linguist-heroine, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the story’s voice of reason and its translator. She’s thoughtful, serious, at ease with her own silence and fears. She’d get along fine with Sandra Bullock’s character in “Gravity,” which like this movie leans into feeling and thinking, and reminds you again that there’s more to this genre than heavy artillery.

The movie begins with an elliptical prelude that guides you in but is forgotten as soon as the aliens touch down minutes later. The director Denis Villeneuve teases his way through these preliminaries, with shots of newscasts and panicked crowds, revealing just enough to work up some excitement. In a sly preview to things and tall creatures to come, Louise keeps looking up — at a blaring television, at shrieking military jets — turning Ms. Adams’s pale face into a screen for the movie that’s just starting to come into view. She’s soon hustled off to the show run by the military (Forest Whitaker plays the good cop, Michael Stuhlbarg the bad), having been enlisted to interpret the alien tongue.

Movie Review: ‘Arrival’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “arrival.”.

In “Arrival,” Amy Adams plays a linguist who tries to communicate with aliens by translating their language. In her review, Manohla Dargis writes: Denis Villeneuve’s newest science-fiction movie is distinctly more hopeful key than most in this genre, one in which the best solutions don’t necessarily materialize in a gunsight. It has a little action, a bit of gunfire and clenched-jawed jittery men. Villeneuve likes big stories with big stakes and he’s very good at working your nerves. “Arrival” isn’t a visionary movie, an intellectual rebus or a head movie; it’s pretty straight in some respects and sometimes corny, with a visual design that’s lovely rather than landmark.

Mr. Villeneuve likes big stories with big stakes, and he’s very skilled at working your nerves. In some of his movies, he punctures the stories with bluntly violent shocks — a stunned survivor seated before a burning truck in “ Incendies ,” corpses sealed inside a drug-house wall in “ Sicario ” — that distill terror into a grabber moment. These visuals can be real showstoppers (the narratives briefly shift into idle); they’re at once off-putting and unsettlingly seductive, and even if you want to look away, it can be hard to. Some of his limitations as a filmmaker are best expressed in the perfect crackling of those flames and the pictorial balance of that shot of walled-up torture victims.

“Arrival” doesn’t need self-regarding jolts. It’s based on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” one of those unassumingly smart science-fiction puzzles that blend absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is that Mr. Chiang not only raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human, but he also embeds them in his writing through different verb tenses and times. In one section, he rummages around in the past; in another, he jumps onto a separate timeline. The movie — the script is by Eric Heisserer — does something similar with cutaways to Louise’s life, shardlike glimpses that help fill in the whole.

Having been spirited away, Louise is moved into a makeshift military base in Montana, one of 12 locations across the globe where the aliens have dropped anchor. There, next to one of their enormous ships — a vessel that hovers over the ground and looks like an elongated black egg with one side neatly sliced off — she’s briefed and prepped amid furrowed brows, data crunching and intimations of the apocalypse. Once she settles in, the movie gets its groove on. The visitors have set up regular visiting hours for the humans, opening a portal through which a small team in hazmat suits can enter. As their machines whir, Louise and the rest gape across the cosmic divide and into the unknown.

The scenes inside the alien ship are transporting. After Louise and her team move through the ship’s portal, they end up in a large chamber facing a luminous rectangle, a kind of window — it looks like a movie screen — through which they can see the aliens. But the room is also a type of a stage, an immersive theater that engages sight, sound and a sense of touch. Louise’s hands and voice quaver, but her eyes shine and widen as the pleasure of the new — and knowing — edges out fear. And when her physicist colleague, Ian (Jeremy Renner), runs a gloved hand over one of the ship’s textured black walls, his expression suggests the delight of a child at the moment of discovery.

Mr. Villeneuve nods to “2001: A Space Odyssey” here and there in the astronaut-like hazmat suits, the allusions to the abyss (the humans sometimes float, as if in space) and of course the looming monoliths, one of them named Stanley Kubrick. These references can seem decorative, almost ritualistic, with one director paying homage to a master. “Arrival” isn’t a visionary movie, an intellectual rebus or a head movie; it’s pretty straight in some respects and sometimes fairly corny, with a visual design that’s lovely rather than landmark. And, as it revisits some of the uncertainties in “2001” — free will, extraterrestrials, God — it seems to turn inward instead of out. (It does both.)

By turns inviting and opaque, Ms. Adams turns softness and quiet into heroic qualities, keeping her voice low, modulated, and using stillness to draw you near. In a nice reversal of how many puzzlers work, the movie becomes more fragmented the closer that Louise gets to figuring out why the aliens have arrived, what they want from Earth and why. Increasingly, her steadiness becomes the very foundation for the narrative, which serves its meaning beautifully. The movie complicates Mr. Chiang’s story, adding action scenes and political notes, which comes off as pretty puny compared with its larger, grander adventure about a woman who, in staring into the void, leaps into life and finds herself.

“Arrival” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for some gun action. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell speak about how “Anyone but You” beat the rom-com odds. Here are their takeaways after the film , debuting on Netflix, went from box office miss to runaway hit.

The vampire ballerina in the new movie “Abigail” has a long pop culture lineage . She and her sisters are obsessed, tormented and likely to cause harm.

In a joint interview, the actors Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough discuss “Under the Bridge,” their new true-crime series  based on a teenager’s brutal killing in British Columbia.

The movie “Civil War” has tapped into a dark set of national angst . In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters say they fear the country’s divides may lead to actual, not just rhetorical, battles.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

• Newsletters

Site search

• Israel-Hamas war
• Home Planet
• 2024 election
• Supreme Court
• TikTok’s fate
• All explainers
• Future Perfect

Filed under:

Arrival is a stunning science fiction movie with deep implications for today

One of the year’s best movies is about linguistics, metaphors, and aliens.

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Arrival is a stunning science fiction movie with deep implications for today

Science fiction is never really about the future; it’s always about us. And Arrival , set in the barely distant future, feels like a movie tailor-made for 2016, dropping into theaters mere days after the most explosive election in most of the American electorate’s memory.

But the story Arrival is based on — the award-winning novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang — was published in 1998, almost two decades ago, which indicates its central themes were brewing long before this year. Arrival is much more concerned with deep truths about language, imagination, and human relationships than any one political moment.

Not only that, but Arrival is one of the best movies of the year, a moving, gripping film with startling twists and imagery. It deserves serious treatment as a work of art.

Arrival is smart, twisty, and serious

The strains of Max Richter’s " On the Nature of Daylight " play over the opening shots of Arrival , which is the first clue for what’s about to unfold: that particular track is ubiquitous in the movies (I can count at least six or seven films that use it, including Shutter Island and this year’s The Innocents ) and is, by my reckoning, the saddest song in the world.

The bittersweet feeling instantly settles over the whole film, like the last hour of twilight. Quickly we learn that Dr. Louise Banks ( Amy Adams ) has suffered an unthinkable loss, and that functions as a prelude to the story: One day, a series of enormous pod-shaped crafts land all over earth, hovering just above the ground in 12 locations around the world. Nobody knows why. And nothing happens.

As world governments struggle to sort out what this means — and as the people of those countries react by looting, joining cults, even conducting mass suicides — Dr. Banks gets a visit from military intelligence, in the form of Colonel Weber ( Forest Whitaker ), requesting her assistance as an expert linguist in investigating and attempting to communicate with whatever intelligence is behind the landing. She arrives at the site with Ian Donnelly ( Jeremy Renner ), a leading quantum physicist, to start the mission. With help from a cynical Agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), they suit up and enter the craft to see if they can make contact.

It’s best not to say much more about the plot, except that it is pure pleasure to feel it unfold. The most visionary film yet from director Denis Villeneuve ( Prisoners , Sicario ) and scripted by horror screenwriter Eric Heisserer ( Lights Out ), its pacing is slower than you’d expect from an alien-invasion film, almost sparse. For a movie with so many complicated ideas, it doesn’t waste any more time on exposition than is absolutely necessary. Arrival is serious and smartly crafted, shifting around like a Rubik’s cube in the hand of a savant, nothing quite making sense until all the pieces suddenly come together. I heard gasps in the theater.

Arrival is interested in how language shapes reality

The film’s premise hinges on the idea, shared by many linguists and philosophers of language, that we do not all experience the same reality. The pieces of it are the same — we live on the same planet, breathe the same air — but our perceptions of those pieces shift and change based on the words and grammar we use to describe them to ourselves and each other.

For instance, there is substantial evidence that a person doesn’t really see (or perhaps "perceive") a color until their vocabulary contains a word, attached to meaning, that distinguishes it from other colors. All yellows are not alike, but without the need to distinguish between yellows and the linguistic tools to do so, people just see yellow. A color specialist at a paint manufacturer, however, can distinguish between virtually hundreds of colors of white. (Go check out the paint chip aisle at Home Depot if you’re skeptical.)

Or consider the phenomenon of words in other languages that describe universal feelings , but can only be articulated precisely in some culture. We might intuitively "feel" the emotion, but without the word to describe it we’re inclined to lump the emotion in with another under the same heading. Once we develop the linguistic term for it, though, we can describe it and feel it as distinct from other shades of adjacent emotions.

These are simple examples, and I don’t mean to suggest that the world itself is different for people from different cultures. But I do mean to suggest that reality — what we perceive as comprising the facts of existence — takes on a different shape depending on the linguistic tools we use to describe it.

Adopting this framework doesn’t necessarily mean any of us are more correct than others about the nature of reality (though that certainly may be true). Instead, we are doing our best to describe reality as we see it, as we imagine it to be. This is the challenge of translation, and why literal translations that Google can perform don’t go beyond basic sentences. Learning a new language at first is just about collecting a new vocabulary and an alternate grammar — here is the word for chair, here is the word for love, here’s how to make a sentence — but eventually, as any bilingual person can attest, it becomes about imagining and perceiving the world differently.

This is the basic insight of Arrival : That if we were to encounter a culture so radically different from our own that simple matters we take for granted as part of the world as it is were radically shifted, we could not simply gather data, sort out grammar, and make conclusions. We’d have to either absorb a different way of seeing , despite our fear, or risk everything.

To underline the point, Dr. Banks and the entire operation are constantly experiencing breakdowns in communication within the team and with teams in other parts of the world, who aren’t sure whether the information they glean from their own visits to pods should be kept proprietary or shared.

Arrival is about more than talking to one another. It’s about the roadmaps we use to navigate the world

It’s not hard to see where this is going, I imagine — something about how if we want to empathize with each other we need to talk to one another, and that’s the way the human race will survive.

But Arrival also layers in some important secondary notes that add nuance to that easy takeaway. Because it’s not just deciphering the words that someone else is saying that’s important: It’s the whole framework that determines how those words are being pinned to meaning. We can technically speak the same language, but functionally be miles apart.

In the film, one character notes that if we were to communicate in the language of chess — which operates in the framework of battles and wars — rather than, say, the language of English, which is bent toward the expression of emotions and ideas, then what we actually say and do would shift significantly. That is, the prevailing metaphor for how beings interact with each other and the world is different. (Some philosophers speak of this as "language games.")

This matters for the film’s plot, but more broadly — since this is sci-fi, and therefore actually about us — it has implications. Language isn’t just about understanding how to say things to someone and ascribe meaning to what comes back. Language has consequences. Embedded in words and grammar is action, because the metaphors that we use as we try to make sense of the world tell us what to do next. They act like little roadmaps.

You have empathized with someone not when you hear the words they’re saying, but when you begin to ascertain what metaphors make them tick, and where that conflicts or agrees with your own. I found myself thinking a lot about this reading Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land , which is up for a National Book Award this year and describes the overarching metaphors (Hochschild calls them "deep stories") that discrete groups of Americans — in this case, West Coast urban liberals and Louisiana rural Tea Partiers — use to make sense of the world. She isn’t trying to explain anything away. She’s trying to figure out what causes people to walk in such drastically different directions and hold views that befuddle their fellow citizens.

Arrival suggests that our mental roadmaps need constant adjustment

Part of the challenge of pluralism is that we’re not just walking around with different ideas in our heads, but with entirely different maps for getting from point A to Z, with different roadblocks on them and different recommendations for which road is the best one. Our A's and Z's don’t even match. We don’t even realize that our own maps are missing pieces that others have.

Presumably one of these maps is better than the others, but we haven’t agreed how we would decide. So we just keep smacking into one another going in opposite directions down the same highway.

Arrival takes off from this insight in an undeniably sci-fi direction that is a little brain-bending, improbable in the best way. But it makes a strong case that communication, not battle or combat, is the only way to avoid destroying ourselves. Communication means not just wrapping our heads around terms we use but the actual framework through which we perceive reality.

And that is really hard. I don’t know how to fix it.

In the meantime, though, good movies are somewhere to start . Luckily Arrival is a tremendously well-designed film, with complicated and unpredictable visuals that embody the main point. Nothing flashy or explosive; in some ways, I found myself thinking of 1970s science-fiction films, or the best parts of Danny Boyle’s 2007 Sunshine , which grounded its humanist story in deep quiet.

The movie concludes on a different note from the linguistic one — one much more related to loss and a wistful question about life and risk. This may be Arrival ’s biggest weakness; the emotional punch of the ending is lessened a bit because it feels a little rushed.

But even that conclusion loops back to the possibilities of the reshaped human imagination. And this week, especially, you don’t need to talk to an alien to see why that’s something we need.

Watch: Fewer computer graphics make for better movies

Will you support Vox today?

We believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, and stewards of this planet. Producing deeply researched, explanatory journalism takes resources. You can support this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Will you join us?

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

Next Up In Culture

Sign up for the newsletter today, explained.

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

Thanks for signing up!

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

Everything’s a cult now

We could be heading into the hottest summer of our lives

How today’s antiwar protests stack up against major student movements in history

What the backlash to student protests over Gaza is really about

You need $500. How should you get it?

Food delivery fees have soared. How much of it goes to workers?

• Movie Review /
• Entertainment /

Arrival review: a soulful sci-fi instant classic

Director denis villeneuve successfully merges hard sci-fi and real emotion in one of the best films of the year.

By Bryan Bishop

Share this story

Early on in Denis Villeneuve’s new film Arrival , it becomes pretty clear that for an alien-invasion movie, it’s actually not all that interested in aliens. As 12 mysterious spacecraft land in different locations around Earth, we see college students getting texted with the news, newscasters describing it, and a linguistics expert played by Amy Adams taking it all in — but we don’t see the ships themselves. Humanity’s reaction is what’s important, and it’s only after the film has slowly, methodically established its priorities that the ships — or "shells," as they’re dubbed — are revealed.

It sets the tone for what’s to come: a mature, thoughtful piece of science fiction that uses a first-contact premise not just as a setup for a doomsday scenario, but as a platform for an incredibly powerful, nuanced look at love, relationships, and the human condition itself. If big-screen science fiction has been going through a maturation process over the past few years, searching for a truly genre-defining moment, it has finally arrived.

Warning: minor spoilers ahead

The films opens as Dr. Louise Banks (Adams) struggles with the death of her teenage daughter, trying to find solace in her daily routine. That process is suddenly interrupted when the 12 shells appear on Earth and the U.S. military comes asking for her help. It turns out they’ve been able to establish some minimal contact with the alien creatures in the shells, but their language is unlike anything known to man. Joining forces with a theoretical physicist named Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Banks goes inside the ship and meets the aliens face-to-tentacle, and slowly starts learning their language and teaching them ours. She’s convinced their intentions are good, but with shells located all around the globe, other countries are having their own interactions, and soon Banks is trying to uncover the reason behind the visit before China or Russia kick off a war with the aliens.

Accessible without ever shying away from the science in sci-fi

That’s the most broad, generic description of the film I can possibly provide, and that’s where I’m going to leave it, because Arrival is a film that’s not so much built up out of plot points and story beats as it's built from emotional and character turns. Adapted from Ted Chiang’s short story "Story of Your Life," Arrival doesn’t flinch when it comes to serious discussion of linguistics, math, or the complex semagrams the aliens use for their written language. But screenwriter Eric Heisserer ( Lights Out ) is remarkably deft in his ability to use those concepts in service of character and theme. The results feel remarkably accessible, even when Arrival is tackling dense concepts that would normally be verboten in a studio film.

Another huge component of that is Villeneuve's approach. The director has been steadily building a rich body of work with movies like Sicario and Prisoners , and working with cinematographer Bradford Young ( Ain’t Them Bodies Saints ) , he creates a beautiful world of cool, symmetrical compositions and ever-patient camera moves. It would be foolish to avoid the Kubrick comparisons — several shots when Banks and Donnelly first enter the alien ship read like direct callbacks to 2001: A Space Odyssey — but that trademarked sterility isn’t just artifice; it’s the nature of the world Villeneuve is creating here. Whether it’s Banks, Donnelly, or the head of the Chinese military, everyone is alone, and can’t find it within themselves to connect with one another, even in the face of world-changing circumstances.

The promise of overcoming that inability to communicate — not just with aliens, but with one another — is what lies at the heart of the film, and it’s an idea that’s brought forward most directly by Amy Adams' performance. She's played a variety of roles covering a range of colors, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her so raw and emotionally compelling. Watching her struggle with the alien language, driven by memories of her daughter, is like mainlining empathy, pushing the film toward a crescendo of an ending that is quietly triumphant and heart-wrenching.

Watching Amy Adams' performance is like mainlining empathy

The funny thing is that we’ve seen swings at this kind of thing before — and more recently than you might think. In 2014, Interstellar launched with the ambitious mission of using a hard sci-fi story to explore the notions of legacy and sacrifice between a father and a daughter. With the talent of Christopher Nolan, a lead actor at peak McConaissance, and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne all on board, expectations were understandably high. While the end result was lovingly rendered, ultimately it fell short — and it wasn’t because the film’s puzzle-like construction or loop-around ending were too convoluted.

It failed because it didn’t resonate emotionally. Interstellar leaves all its grand themes and ambitions inert and lifeless. Arrival 's extraordinary success is that it combines its bravura style and grand science-fiction questions with tremendous emotional intelligence and a heart so full, it’s ready to burst. It’s a film that dares us to look ahead, to open ourselves up to vulnerability and sacrifice, and to take chances and engage with the world around us, no matter what dire consequences we fear may be just around the corner. That transcends genre, or even medium. It is simply art, and at a time when so many seem intent on walling off themselves or their countries, it’s exactly what we need.

This review originally appeared on September 10, 2016 in conjunction with the film's screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has been republished to coincide with the film's wide theatrical opening.

The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down

The apple vision pro’s ebay prices are making me sad, in the first autonomous racing league race, the struggle was real, they turned cattle ranches into tropical forest — then climate change hit, i traded in my macbook and now i’m a desktop convert.

More from this stream TIFF 2016: the best, boldest, and most awards-ready new films

Moonlight is a beautifully nuanced gay coming-of-age tale, a monster calls is so good you won't care that you're crying, la la land is a gloriously earnest singin' in the rain for the 21st century, in loving, jeff nichols' version of history is as quiet as the real thing.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Arrival review – a poetic vision of contact with aliens

Denis Villeneuve’s uplifting sci-fi drama about attempts to understand extraterrestrial visitors could be just the antidote we need

T he slender short story that inspired this ambitious “first contact” film contains discussions of Fermat’s principle and diagrammatical explanations of refracted light, hardly a blueprint for a multiplex-friendly fantasy flick. Yet from the atemporal monologue of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, in which the narrator remembers events in the future tense, screenwriter Eric Heisserer has spun an admirable script for a film as cerebrally adventurous as it is emotionally accessible. Confidently directed by French-Canadian film-maker Denis Villeneuve, making his first foray into the sci-fi genre before the forthcoming Blade Runner sequel , Arrival charts a bold course between the guiding stars of Robert Zemeckis’s Contact and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind , with just a hint of the gravitational pull of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris .

“I used to think this was the beginning of your story,” says Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) over the opening strains of Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, a theme to which Arrival will return significantly in its closing stanzas. With startling economy, Villeneuve conjures a snapshot portrait of motherhood cut short by a daughter’s death; love and despair described with surgical precision. From such tragedy we move with equal economy to the titular event – a string of spaceships spanning the globe for reasons unknown. Leading linguist Dr Banks is promptly pressed into service as an interplanetary translator, teamed with Jeremy Renner’s tetchy-but-cute physicist Ian Donnelly, who insists that “the cornerstone of civilisation isn’t language, it’s science”.

Together, this star-crossed pair must venture into the void, attempting to converse with creatures who are seen through a glass darkly,and who communicate via inky circles, what Chiang calls “mandalas... in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable”. Forest Whitaker’s typically terse army intelligence officer wants quick answers: “What do they want? Where are they from?” But for Banks, understanding these visitors will require a more intuitive, elliptical approach.

Although the spectre of low-hanging spaceships encircling the world seems to evoke the apocalyptic iconography of Independence Day , it’s the rough-hewn beauty of British director Gareth Edwards’s ironically titled Monsters to which Arrival owes the greater debt. From the “dirty sci-fi” aesthetic of Bradford Young’s tactile cinematography to the gentle, odd-couple chemistry of Adams and Renner, there’s an intimacy here that resonates with Edwards’s 2010 low-budget debut. In contrast to such human touches, the pebble-shaped alien vessels are impressively otherworldy, eerily recalling Douglas Adams’s description of spaceships that “hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”. Once inside these shells, production designer Patrice Vermette’s sets seem every bit as unearthly as HR Giger ’s Alien environments – vast and unknowable, their otherness accentuated by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score. Yet even in these surroundings we can still feel Louise’s all-too-human heartbeat, with Amy Adams’s talent for telegraphing tangible emotions via tiny facial gestures shining through the isolating wrap of an orange hazmat suit.

Anyone familiar with the Tralfamadorians of Kurt Vonnnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, who view time as permanent, like “a stretch of the Rocky Mountains” , will recognise the underlying themes, both philosophical and emotional, which make Louise Banks a latterday Billy Pilgrim. Yet while the source codes may be familiar, there’s a pleasing clarity to Arrival ’s dramatisation of such complex concepts as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a theory that language defines cognition, which Dr Banks experiences first hand. While the military hawks press for strategic advantage, Louise finds her world reordered by alien semantics (“Are you dreaming in their language?’), notions of joy and grief refracted through the prism of a linguistic stargate.

As befits the director of Incendies and Sicario , Villeneuve also injects a sociopolitical edge into the fantasy narrative, with growing international tensions and calls for an armed response striking a very contemporary nerve, alongside tense discussion about understanding “the difference between a weapon and a tool”. Yet such adornments remain secondary to the core story of parental bonds transcending time and space, locating this in the same cinematic constellation as Christopher Nolan’s equally touching Interstellar .

“They should have sent a poet,” said Jodie Foster’s astronaut Dr Ellie Arroway in Contact , another character haunted by the loss of a loved one, locked in a galaxy-spanning battle between facts and faith. At a time when some of us, appalled by events on Earth, are looking to the stars for reassurance that love can indeed trump tragedy, Arrival may be just the poem we need; a departure from the dystopian visions which now appear all too real, a memory of a future in which light still shines in the darkness.

• Mark Kermode's film of the week
• Science fiction and fantasy films
• Jeremy Renner
• Denis Villeneuve

Comments (…)

Most viewed.