The film is based on a story written by Ted Chiang which won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 2000. If you’re not much of a fan of sci-fi suffice to say that’s a pretty big deal in the field. If that doesn’t pique your interest it has a rating of 4.7/5 on Amazon.co.uk and 4.34 on Goodreads (at least, the short story collection it’s in does). The director is Denis Villeneuve whose work you’ve most likely seen in Sicario and will see more of next year in Blade Runner 2049. Yes, he’s the guy attempting to follow up on one of the most influential films of all time. Personally, I think that makes him a little crazy but that can sometimes be a good thing in a director.

The cast is small, it’s not humans vs aliens war film like Independence Day 2 or a great big adventure like Star Trek Beyond. The best comparison I’ve heard is the Jodie Foster film, Contact. Don’t go if, like the chap in front of me, you can’t sit through 2 hours of slowly building high-quality sci-fi and intend to leave before the end of the second act.

The star of the film is Amy Adams (currently Lois Lane) who plays linguistics professor, Louise Banks. Forest Whitaker is Colonel Weber the strangely calm chap charged with running the first contact mission in Montana. Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) is the theoretical physicist whose there to demonstrate that this problem can’t be solved with maths and physics. There’re a couple of other named characters but they’re not very relevant in comparison to the aliens and I can’t tell you much about any of them without spoilers.
 

This is where the review gets really difficult, I actually had to watch the trailers again. I have to get this out of the way early on, this film is superb. I’m terrified that I might accidentally drop a clanger and say something that qualifies as a spoiler. So I recommend you just go and watch it now before you read the rest of it. If you haven’t seen the trailer, don’t, just go and watch it. If you have seen the trailers, read on, I hope by the end to have talked you into seeing this.

Right at the start of the film, Adams arrives to deliver a lecture and finds most of her students missing and within minutes news alerts on their phones explain why. Fifteen hundred foot tall ships of unknown origin have settled above a dozen points across the globe and are floating there, motionless and without markings or features.

The population of the world is understandably shocked and begin to panic and Adams returns to her office after a couple of days when nothing threatening has happened. It’s there that Forest Whitaker introduces himself, explains why she has security clearance (for past translation efforts for the military) and asks her if she can translate a sample of the aliens ‘speech’.

She ends up on a helicopter with Renner’s physicist, off to Montana where one of the alien ships floats above the landscape. I defy you not to be rather blown away by this shot, it’s a gorgeous bit of cinematography and you’ll find that standard is maintained throughout.

The film then begins to get into the meat of the story, exactly how does first contact work? Whitaker knows what they need and explains it quite simply as two things they need to know “What do they want, where are they from?”. Adams and Renner then have to try and find a way to communicate with the aliens and we get some insightful comments from Adams about how this can’t be done as quickly as people are hoping.

The average Hollywood sci-fi film depicts aliens that visit Earth for the sake of conquest. It’s a tired and ridiculous idea that one species would tramp across the universe in the hopes of asset stripping one planet which just happens to be inhabited. That’s one of my least favourite sci-fi tropes and is the same premise used in Avatar, a film notable only for its cool 3D and with just about zero credibility.

There’s none of that nonsense at the heart of The Arrival. You’re getting a genuine sci-fi story, with no gaping plot holes, no aliens with bizarre motivations, no stereotypical politicians going immediately nuts and launching nukes.

The film has a pretty upbeat take on the possibility of first contact and that’s refreshing. I’d like it to The Martian in that respect. It’s not as funny as The Martian, though you have to admire the fact that the screenwriters managed to pull off a gag about a popular 80’s singer.

 

The Payoff

Obviously, I’m not going to tell you what happens in the third act. I think the crucial thing here is ‘Well if these aliens visit Earth for some reason and the whole film is about communicating with them, why are they here? It’s not just to suck the iron out of our blood or something similarly lame, is it?’. Nope, not at all. They do have a reason, you do get enough information to satisfy your interest, a sequel isn’t a necessity (though I’d LOVE to see one).

This film is absolutely beautiful. We saw it on the ‘Super Screen’ at Cardiff Cineworld which is just a big 8K screen with slightly nicer (but weirdly narrow) seats and the latest Dolby sound. It looks great and the establishing shot of the first contact base camp and the ship is a sight to behold. The ships are simple, eerie and totally inscrutable. Clearly the work of an advanced civilisation that doesn’t have to worry about petty human concerns such as energy consumption and obeying the laws of physics as we understand them.

There’s a little less discussion and panic about that than I think is realistic. I suppose you can assume that there’re lots of other people worrying about how the aliens make their 1,500-foot tall ships float over sea and land and how they propel them. They look amazing doing it though and never feel unreal and importantly, I don’t think they distract you from the meat of the story which they easily could. That’ll be why you don’t get side plots with frantic scientists going bonkers over their level of technology.