A triumph for Amy Adams, and for science fiction in film

Rating: 10/10 (20 November 2017)

Rating a film 10/10 is very rare for me, but this one absolutely deserves it. It's a masterwork from Denis Villeneuve, and this is also a triumph for Amy Adams. She joins a very small list of first-rate actresses who carried the entire weight of a science fiction movie on their shoulders, along with Jodie Foster (Contact), Helen Hunt (Twister), and Sandra Bullock (Gravity). In "Arrival", Jeremy Renner gets co-lead billing (and is excellent as well) but it's really Adams who is the story from start to finish.
It's based on "The Story of Your Life" by writer Ted Chiang, but Villeneuve and his writing crew made quite a few pretty substantial changes, and I think the result is actually better on screen that it was on the page. In Chiang's story, the aliens (the Heptapods) stay in orbit, and communicate with humans only by way of a sort of holograph station on the ground. And when they leave again, they just ... go. No explanation given and no closure to the story. The movie is, overall, a richer and more satisfying experience.
This movie is unapologetically cerebral in the way it's built on the central concepts of language and communication. How do you start communicating with these new aliens when you have to start from ground zero with absolutely NOTHING in common (not even your planet)? Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the linguist, is the central player in the team that gets it done, and bit by fascinating bit we get to see how it happens. The process is not rushed, and (!) despite the military camp setting where the action happens, it's not violent. (There is one smallish explosion, and a bit of offstage gunfire, but that's it.) What a pleasure to watch a science fiction film that's not just a CGI slugfest. Actually, those so-called action-SF films aren't really SF at all - they're just the empty, boring calories of eye candy. "Arrival" is the real thing. It's an intelligent, idea-driven, gripping story that lives and breathes in an imagined world just beyond our own.
One feature of the story that I liked very much was the simple but effective device that not everything was explained. Who are the heptapods, really, and where did they come from? How do they control gravity within their ships, and how do they manage interstellar travel? Most of all, why contact us? We understand by the end that they came here to teach us their language because 3000 years in the future they are going to need us, but what exactly are we going to do for them? These things are just left for us to think over. The same approach was used in Robert Zemeckis' "Contact" (1997), when the alien race who transmit The Message to us bring Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) through a series of wormholes to meet them. But then we learn that these aliens did NOT build the wormholes, and they don't know who did; all they can say is "Maybe they'll come back some day." All of a sudden, yet another vista opens up. Though the benevolent Messagers are staggeringly more advanced than humans, somewhere/when there are the Tunnel Builders who are just as far beyond them. Levels upon levels. Both of these films gain extra depth and richness by invoking vastly wider context lying beyond what we get to see.
(SPOILER ALERT! From here on, don't read if you haven't yet seen the film.) On a different level, the story is about Louise herself and her personal journey. Adams' understated style perfectly fits the character of a woman who's introverted by nature but who has the quiet confidence of an accomplished expert in her field. Her eyes always reveal that she's thinking and observing. At the beginning, the impression from a fragmented series of little flashbacks is that she must have lost a child to terminal illness but has moved on from that tragedy to continue with her academic university life. Then the aliens arrive, in a dozen locations all over the Earth; they're not attacking, not actually doing anything at all, but not leaving either. She's conscripted to help with the project of how to talk to them. Physicist Ian Donnelly (Renner), as team leader, develops into a close co-worker and eventually into a fledgling romantic interest. But her flashbacks continue, getting worse and worse as she succeeds in getting deeper into the Heptapods' minds. It's a slow-burn mystery, and somewhere along the line it gradually becomes clear that she's quite literally remembering her own future, not her past. At this point, the story becomes not just a path to solving the puzzle of the aliens' logographic language, but a kind of time-travel SF. Louise is going to succeed in learning Heptapod because, in the future, she HAS succeeded, and can reach back to teach herself (with the help of the clues the Heptapods plant in her). The fact that her actions save the world from nuclear war and set humanity on a new path are just nice byproducts of the storyline. Closing the loop brings the story to a completely satisfying end.
The most memorable line in the film is, without a doubt, "Abbott is death process", though I'm admittedly lifting it out of the context that gives it full meaning. This gently spoken little bit of dialog, translated from Heptapod, has to be among the most poignant in any movie. I'd love to see more of Ted Chiang's intelligent stories put onto the screen. One that would work particularly well should be his "Tower of Babel" which is just mind-bendingly clever and would look great on the screen.