What Do Aliens REALLY Want, Anyway?
Arrival / directed by Denis Villenueve
Arrival is a cautious but progressive tale of alien-human contact, pushing the boundaries of Hollywood sci-fi conventions without quite blasting them into outer space. It opens with startlements small and large: first, a montage of a woman played by Amy Adams interacting with her daughter, in which the child succumbs to a deadly disease, then scenes of this same woman trying to teach a class on linguistics, only to have the class cancelled by events beyond her control -- the sudden appearance of twelve huge, uncanny objects floating just above the earth at various locations. The situation evokes strains of dread, but coming on the heels of watching the professor lose her child means we watch it with a certain detachment, as if the end of the world isn’t far and away the only worst thing one can imagine.
But long before the atmosphere of foreboding can fully take hold, the government, in the person of one Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), contacts the woman, Dr. Louise Banks, to ask her help in communicating with what have been determined to be alien visitors. Her movement to the site is emblematic of the film’s careful oscillation between mechanistic control and emotional openness: she’s swooped away by a military helicopter by night, in a flurry of alien-abduction brightness and thundering engines, arriving by early light at the site of a vessel that has landed in America; dwarfing the nearby encampment of tents and jeeps, in design appearing like nothing so much as an enormous slate-grey, elongated contact lense, its gargantuan bulk hovers delicately over a verdant Montana meadow.
The vessels’ appearance signals that something has changed irrevocably on Earth, but the basic question the U.S. and other governments want answered is, What do they want? It’s common sense enough, but as Arrival’s story gradually reveals, what’s common sense to one species isn’t always common sense to another. The American response, like that of other countries around the world, is deeply militarized; the arrivals are seen as a threat until proven otherwise. But the governments are at least savvy enough to understand that communication is the key, hence the promotion of linguists to refreshing cinematic heights.
The build-up to Louise’s first contact with the aliens is visually effective, a slow, real-time transition from the ordinary to the extraordinary, as an everyday mechanical lift like you might see at Home Depot hoists Louise and her companions up to the bottom of the ship and the uncanny gravity-free space inside. And though the alien vessel and its inhabitants are filmed in the same subdued greyish palette as the rest of the film, their spaces are nonetheless a virtual Electric Ladyland compared to the nuts and bolts tent city where the rest of the film is largely set. They clearly possess a keen sense of drama, slowly looming into view through a dense fog. They gain biological plausibility through their resemblance to enormous seven-tentacled squid, those intelligent earthly cephalopods - but combined with the greyness and bulk of faceless elephants. Their forms are deeply ambiguous - they are huge and threatening, speaking in enormous rumbles of non-intelligibility, yet are possibly merely gentle giants -- enhancing the fundamental question as to their intentions.
And speaking of clouds: the squid parallels only increase when it turns out that their tentacles squirt out inky puffs that form symbols of language, complicated whorls that resemble dinner plates if you’d just been served an oily meal and had diplomatically scraped it towards the edges in order not to offend your host. (This is a film that makes allusions to big-league predecessors like 2001, Interstellar, and Independence Day - but I wonder if these undersea-evoking visitors are a playful call-out to that less critically acclaimed yet still-beloved thriller about whales and their interstellar comrades, Star Trek IV? No? Well, a Trekkie can dream, can’t he?!) Part of the film’s cleverness is that, as it progresses, it allows the viewer space to draw his or her own conclusions as to the nature of this visitation: are they benign, or are they perverse monsters who sadistically enjoy ratcheting up the tension before unspooling death rays on capital cities a la the invaders of Independence Day?
As Louise works to gain a basic understanding of their language, and to teach English to the aliens, we learn that the situation around the world is deteriorating; there’s widespread public distrust of how their leaders are handling this unsettling scenario, and other governments are pursuing more paranoid and distrustful responses to the aliens. Indeed, there’s a prescient sense that we’re looking at the world might be like after four or eight years of an America-first Trump administration, with its zero-sum mentality). The response is remarkably masculinized: the world leaders and people working on the response effort are nearly all men, and they seem to project their own aggressions onto the unintelligible visitors. By comparison, Louise seems wildly emotional, even mildly unstable, as she at first grapples with the strangeness of the aliens, and then as she works feverishly to speak to them, the trembling of her body and features showing the physical responses to what she’s encountering. And she’s intuitive enough to realize that language isn’t just about words: she achieves an early breakthrough at the level of trust when she strips off her unneeded and bulky hazmat suit to get as close to the aliens as she can.
As the story (mostly) subtly moves towards revelations that further explain the import of Louise’s loss of her daughter to the story of the aliens, the maneuvers falter a bit as it enters sci-fi territory that any Star Trek fan (*ahem*) will not be surprised by, and particularly reminiscent of that that other recent cerebral big-budget sci-fi hit, Interstellar; and there is one piece of information that is particularly clumsily communicated, no matter how important it is to explaining what is happening. Yet other images and information that seemed sloppy or manipulative earlier gain emotional resonance as a new perspective reveals itself, and there is an intriguing sense of a story being told beyond the obvious one that has all the world a-panic. An over-neatness to how all the puzzle pieces fit together (I know, I know, I am hard to please) makes what could be expansive and mind-bending feel more satisfying, but it is hard to be stirred, if not shaken, by the emotion of the tale.
There are some thematic similarities to director Villeneuve's last film, Sicario, in which a conscientious woman tries to defy the masculine, violent order in which she must operate. But while that film turned trite and unbelievable, it's worth noting that this new film about the outlandish idea of alien contact gives a much more persuasive account of a female battling for good against a patriarchal and militarized opposition.
