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16 The film review corner
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The
Film Review Corner
ARRIVAL( 2016)
Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner & Forest Whittaker
Dennis Villeneuve’ s graceful entry into mainstream cinema in 2013 with Prisoners was an exercise of ample style and substance. The muted greys of the rainy Pennsylvanian suburbs bore witness to the sensitively painted tensions, grievances and madnesses of a tragedy-stricken family. Sicario followed in 2015, displaying the same deft and artful direction. And in 2016 we have Arrival.
Set in what seems to be present time, we follow Dr. Louise Banks( Amy Adams), a high-flyer in the world of linguistics, who is contacted by the military to decipher
a warped and gutturalsounding but nevertheless hot mixtape from some new-on-the-scene extraterrestrials. Aided by astrophysicist Ian Donnelly, she works to communicate meaningfully with them in order to find the reason for their visit, and along the way, they struggle with metaphysical incertitude, dead children and fractions.
Though this is the basic premise of the film, there is a certain thoughtful charm and creativity in the execution. It is slower paced than other
“ communication breakdown and global turmoil in times of uncertainty”
comparable Hollywood scifi productions, but it serves Arrival well. Its emotional arc is somewhat touching and manages to dip only a generous foot into twee sentimentality whereas Interstellar stripped off and cannonballed in. It is perhaps closer to 2001: A Space Odyssey in its calculated pacing and distinct visual style( sans floating space babies and technicoloured psychedelia) complete with allusions to 2001’ s orange space suits and black monoliths.
Arrival’ s slick sleightof-hand makes sure that though it is marketed as
another alien invasion story, its focus is almost squarely on the humans. An approach primed to explore the timely and topical themes of communication breakdown and global turmoil in times of uncertainty as well as difficult circumstances at the individual level. We see words, thoughts, intentions and actions interpreted and misinterpreted with all the stupidity and brilliance of which our little species is capable; we see international relations break up, make up, break down and pull itself back together; we see our
Sphincter magazine | volume 80 issue 2 | Winter 2016 edition protagonist struggle to come to terms with death, the nature of time and our own( in) significance.
While this is great, it is not without its share of problems, part of which is that it descends into cliché to fill the leftover spaces: faceless, charmless military men who are much too ready to abandon diplomacy; faceless, charmless higher-up agent types who throw spanner after spanner in the protagonist’ s works; Russia and China wanting bombs first and questions later- all basic tropes of a disaster movie. It also suffers from a lack of interesting locales and visual stimuli: mainly taking place in a grey house, grey alien room and grey army barracks- it’ s sometimes painfully bland-looking. The cinematographer of his last two films is absent from this one and sometimes it’ s all too apparent.
Arrival is not a great film, it is however, a good one. It’ s smarter than expected, but probably less smart than it would like to be; it’ s in turn pretty and ugly and at once entertaining and a little frustrating.
As Banks would say, it’ s a zero sum game.
Prav Somarathne
Film Columnist 2 nd Year Medical Student
“ although there is a certain thoughtful charm and creativity in the execution, it is slower paced than other comparable films”