When one considers the current political climate in the United States, the timeliness of something like Denis Villeneuve's ARRIVAL is pretty fantastic. Given the premise of Amy Adam's expert linguist, Louise Banks, being called in to interpret the intentions of the seemingly unintelligible alien visitors to the Earth, it's hard not to think of how there are so many chasms between modern people in this day and age and how they put many of us in similar situations.
This kind of layered, heavily nuanced film-making isn't in any way new for Villeneuve, as his previous English-language film, SICARIO, was a pretty measured look at the intersection of dubious government action and hyper-masculinity, as well as being an allegorical take on how people face trauma at the hands of those systems. That same care carries over to ARRIVAL, a film that manages to work in both the concrete and the abstract. The actual drama of the film is effective due to the purposeful slowness of some of the pacing, scenes sometimes crawling from one to the next. Their run-times give you space to breathe in every detail, after which pieces start to come together.
I would dare say there's a sense of....melancholy? It's this haze that hovers over the whole of the movie, one definitely explored as some events go a bit downhill and as some characters are profoundly changed by their experiences with the visitors. It's these experiences that contain the heart of the film: the fact that the ability to communicate ideas is one of the most powerful tools we have as human beings.
