as metaphysical and analytical as the mysteries of the universe

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2017)

Arrival is a very odd name for this movie, since so much of the movie does not focus on the "arrival" of the aliens, yet communicating with them. Perhaps what it refers to is the arrival of truth at the film's end. The aliens in the picture constantly try to communicate with the humans, and we live this process via Amy Adams's language expert. We don't really try and talk to them on our own, as everything is a response to an actions the aliens perform (almost as if they had this planned out?). This is how a director of the movie, Denis Villeneuve, communicates his language to the audience and this journey is an arrival of a movie that is aware of cinema's past and its future.
Everything in Arrival is fluid and expertly done, from the brilliant camera work to the pulsating score to the merging of several timelines which effortlessly tell a story. In a lot of ways, Arrival is the perfection and culmination of the extra-terrestrial sci fi movies of the 21st century so far: from District 9 to Prometheus to Interstellar, we have somehow gotten here and it makes us stop and reanalyze it all. There is little action in the movie, an explosion is shoehorned in during a subplot in the middle and there is media coverage footage showing how different countries react to what they assume is a threat. But it all connects to the current events of the times, as our inability to communicate with China or Russia may lead to disaster because people get scared when they do not understand something as simple as language and perceive anything or anyone different then themselves as a threat or an alien.
Arrival presents us with many ideas, the most powerful being what is the connection between time and language? The alien's language in Arrival, revealed as a symbol of circular fluid, is a metaphor for the circle of the plot of the film itself. There are so many mediocre alien invasion movies over the last fifty years of movie making that Arrival is like a masterclass in how to do it right: accessible to the mainstream movie going public and as metaphysical and analytical as the mysteries of the universe. There are many unanswered questions that thrill the mind rather than frustrate and so many places where the movie could have faltered but it never does. This may be Amy Adams best cinematic performance yet but acting itself is almost made irrelevant throughout the course of the movie that it is easy to overlook; this movie immerses the viewer in an alien spaceship and makes one reexamine their entire existence. Arrival simply does the best job of communicating and illustrating its point then any other movie of the year.