Science, Soul, Feelings, and Time

Rating: 10/10 (13 November 2016)

We do learn from experiences: good and bad. Also, we will succeed in life if we manage to look at life from all possible angles (figuratively). The more we are exposed to, the more successful we are likely to be. However, we need to be able to still in touch with our emotions and others'. In this challenging and engaging Science fiction film, we get to see how both rationales can stand next to each other, and they're all embodied in a character beautifully played by Amy Adams, who makes quite a comeback to solid acting after a couple of less than satisfying movies.
Here she is a linguist, one of, if not the best in the world. She knows her standing because she's trained herself to be the best; yet she is also able to understand how language functions, and how it has evolved, and most importantly, it can't exist without context and communication. This is what the movie is all about, and it's obvious from the beginning. Still, more than a few in the audience are going to be sidetracked by their own expectations and the very remarkable design of the film.
Based on a short story, the film is expanded both visually and thematically, involving the audience with its plot, and more importantly, with the level of execution by its director and its main star. Adams takes on the role, uses her eyes, voice, and body to convey all the emotions that are clashing inside of her. She tells her team that one must try different approaches to understand what the aliens want, that one must not give up. In the meantime, we are given flashbacks of her life and some dark moments that must have shaped who she has become. Not everyone of her family scenes are sad. There's much love and happiness in there, too. They're bittersweet, and somehow, they're connected to what she's trying to decipher.
Twelve mysterious spaceships, which somehow bring to mind the monolith in the 2001 movies are hovering in different part of the world, challenging each of those regions, taunting them with the possibility of something terrible on the future. Still, a few of the scientific teams break through, only to have a few of them end up tragically, and one of them set on starting what might possibly be, the end of the world.
Adams proves to be the key to the resolution of the mystery, and it's a bit of a shock to realize what is really happening, and how essential she is to making sure that things turn out o.k. Unfortunately, she must deal with some interesting variables: the political agenda of some countries, the unwillingness to trust each other, and the inability to have faith and to dream.
Circles are essential to the story. They come in all shapes and designs, and they are the way the alien species communicates with Adams and the other people around her. There's a bit of a competition between the scientists and the linguists, until they realize they need each other. Also, we get to see the creatures in some disturbing close ups which make us understand why humans are, to say the least, stressed because we are very limited in our beliefs and sometimes can't see beyond what is front of your face. They can't see that the aliens are willing to communicate, that they might share some similarities with the human race, and that they might need each other. In the tradition of H.G. Wells, the great Science fiction films work with both our feelings and our abilities to rationalize whenever possible.
Villanueve keeps you hanging and might test a few people in the audience who are expecting for something flashy and dazzling to happen. It does, it is electrifying to know that stories can still be told without resorting to a barrage of unnecessary special effects. This film has the brain, the heart, and the intelligence to treat us with respect and to even throw some philosophies for us to ponder what it is that we are doing with our lives, and how time is really more than anything a circle, a perfect shape that is all over us in the universe and we certainly learn to take it for granted. You won't after you see "Arrival".