Arrival

Someone a few rows below me clears their throat, and suddenly I realise that for the past 40 minutes, no-one in the cinema has made a sound. This moment came as Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker slowly advance into the belly of an alien spaceship; the culmination of Arrival’s first act. In Denis Villeneuve’s most adventurous film yet, twelve spaceships hover metres above the ground in countries across the world. Army Colonel Weber, played by Whitaker, enlists linguistics expert Louise Banks, played by Adams, and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly, played by Renner, to attempt rudimentary communication with their visitors, to discover their ultimate intention.

Eements of the plot are comparable to other sci-fi favourites like Interstellar and alien invasion fare such as Independence Day and The Day the Earth Stood Still, but the experience of seeing this for the first time was utterly unique. For one thing, it’s the first time I’ve ever physically sensed a movie dividing the audience. While that innocent cough I mentioned above seemed to shake many from some kind of trance, it seemed a rallying call for an equal number of others to fidget or rummage around for another piece of popcorn. This divide was clear as the credits rolled, and personified by my colleagues in the office: I found it gripping up to a point, another loved it, and the other found it interminably dull.

Its construction is also a change from the norm: that looming spaceship isn’t necessarily there to frighten or devastate, but to enthrall, its featureless black shell an empty space in the skyline onto which we project our fears and questions. To relay these anxieties is Banks, giving us a similar bugs-eye view as Cooper from Interstellar, packed with an emotionally-charged parent-child dynamic to boot. However, whilst McConaughey’s character was constantly awash with philosophical wonder and scientific know-how, Adams' is the closest we’ve come to seeing a believably ‘normal’ person being sucked into the maelstrom of military action, political uncertainty and media hysteria that constitutes first contact.

This is not her first time making a close encounter (see Man of Steel), but without the shackles of a franchise, her character is allowed a level of depth more deserving of Adams’ talent. Here, she employs a look of great pain, awe and misplacement through her gaze alone. It takes an awful lot to make varying levels of confusion and fear interesting for two hours, but Adams makes it unbelievably gripping. Renner is playing the comic relief to a certain extent, but it’s more Hurt Locker than Hawkeye (smart without falling into snarky). Both leads actually look like they could do Banks and Donnelly’s jobs for real. Despite the slight, unavoidable shimmer of Hollywood make-up, they’re not glamorized, particularly as they spend a great deal of time enveloped in clumsy orange hazmat suits.

Visually, it’s a different tale. Bradford Young’s photography is polished to a mirror shine, doing more with blacks and whites than most cinematographers do with an entire rainbow, and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score doesn’t come packed with the overwrought aggressiveness that’s so vehemently present in his other work. In fact, this score is quite the opposite: it slinks elegantly across the background before suddenly catching you out. At the apex of a simply flawless panning shot – in which Villeneuve and Young finally reveal the ominous black shell hanging over the Montana plains – Jóhannsson kicks the strings into motion, and an eerie wail sends a visible shiver through the audience.

Some dodgy CG hair aside, the visual wizardry is minimalist and beautiful, employed only when necessary and to incredible effect. Perhaps betraying that the film isn’t really about them, the aliens are nothing radical to look at. Their method of communication is remarkable, for sure, but it’s a cerebral wonder as much as a physical one, and the only special effect in attendance at the extraordinary finale is reserved purely for your brain.

As well as securing Villeneuve, Young and Adams as magisterial talents once and for all, Arrival is a critical, timely parable about communication and empathy. It’s the natural progression of sci-fi cinema, where contemporary and timeless themes collide with state-of-the-art filmmaking technology. Now if they could have only excluded the love story subplot - the film would have been perfect!