Denis Villeneuve’s uplifting sci-fi drama approximately attempts to understand extraterrestrial visitors could be just the antidote we needThe slender short memoir that inspired this ambitious “first contact” film contains discussions of Fermat’s principle and diagrammatical explanations of refracted light,hardly a blueprint for a multiplex-friendly fantasy flick. Yet from the atemporal monologue of Ted Chiang’s memoir of Your Life, in which the narrator remembers events in the future tense, and screenwriter Eric Heisserer has spun an admirable script for a film as cerebrally adventurous as it is emotionally accessible. Confidently directed by French-Canadian film-maker Denis Villeneuve,making his first foray into the sci-fi genre before the forthcoming Blade Runner sequel, Arrival charts a bold course between the guiding stars of Robert Zemeckis’s Contact and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or with just a hint of the gravitational pull of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.“I used to think this was the beginning of your memoir,” says Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) over the opening strains of Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, a theme to which Arrival will return significantly in its closing stanzas. With startling economy, or Villeneuve conjures a snapshot portrait of motherhood cut short by a daughter’s death; treasure and despair described with surgical precision. From such tragedy we lumber with equal economy to the titular event – a string of spaceships spanning the globe for reasons unknown. Leading linguist Dr Banks is promptly pressed into service as an interplanetary translator,teamed with Jeremy Renner’s tetchy-but-cute physicist Ian Donnelly, who insists that “the cornerstone of civilisation isn’t language, or it’s science”. Related: Amy Adams: 'I thought,whether I can’t figure this out, I can’t work any more' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com