A psychological drama in disguise

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2017)

Remember Lucy? That film made by a French director about a girl who took a brain-enhancing drug which gave her abilities beyond logical comprehension. Well, if you do then Arrival, made by another French director, might be something you're prepared for.
Is it completely true? Both yes and no. Yes, because this film tries to take a different path unfolding a rather exploited premise, breaking both the clichés and the barriers of plausibility. No, because this time action is not the means by which the film talks to its audience. Not the main means at least.
It's hard to discuss the film's details without crossing onto the land of spoilers, and you definitely don't want this film to be spoiled for you. But one thing is for sure: if you don't mind some suspension of disbelief and if you perceive cinema not just as a carrier of logically-grounded and scientifically-proved statements but rather as a conduit for emotions, then Arrival is a kind of a movie you might not wanna miss.
At the center of this intertwined whirlwind of human feelings and grand scientific revelations is a figure of Louise Baker (played by Amy Adams), a top-level linguist summoned to establish contact with a group of aliens. Mrs Adams, along with her co-star Jeremy Renner who played Ian Donnelly, a physicist and Louise's colleague, are no strangers to the films featuring extraterrestrial creatures. Yet it's not the sci-fi that has the most value in Arrival. It's the whole gamut of our very human emotions, from fear, anger and desperation to hope, happiness and love. And while there are some nice visuals to please our eyes in this film, and some intellectual claims and assumptions to make our brains engaged, it's the feelings, and how painfully exposed emotion-wise Amy Adams goes to convey them, are what you keep thinking about and sensing once the film is over. And that, in our utterly material world, is an achievement of its own accord.
I still can't get over the obvious parallels with Lucy, something that you'll probably be thinking about as well once you've seen the films. Yet Lucy, albeit so action-packed and fast-paced, felt incredibly hollow inside, so hollow that the absurdity of its premise becomes first apparent and then abhorrent. Here, however, the absurdity is just a single step you only have to take once, in a leap of faith, to reach the connection with what's happening on screen. Just like Louise, who reaches out to the alien creatures to be able to communicate with them in their strange language, this film talks to us and induces thoughts and emotions both familiar and so irrelevant to what's seemingly being discussed. What do we make of our lives? Do we regret our mistakes? Would we change something if we knew what it's gonna end with? Would we wanna keep living at all? There are no correct answers to those questions, neither in this film nor anywhere else, but sometimes even simply asking could make a change. After all, some things are just a reflection of how we see and treat them.