Arrival is a beautiful, superbly emotional sci-fi story that’s unafraid to be different

Paramount Pictures

It’s getting near the end of the year, so we should probably start thinking about our favorites. Before I saw Arrival, I really felt like Deadpool was my favorite of the year. There are some things left to come out, but right now, I do have a front runner.

I first came across the work of Ted Chiang something along the lines of five years ago or so. A book called Stories of Your Life and Others by him was recommended by a friend with similar tastes in fiction, and I decided to check it out. At the time, I had to order a used out of print version, which is no longer the case if you want it (which you should). And it was filled with out there, intelligent, amazing sci-fi stories.

The “Story of Your Life” one was initially though not one one of my favorites, because I didn’t get it at first. Eventually I went back and reread it, and now I rate it very highly. So I had a lot of thoughts about a potential adaptation to this cerebral, not very action heavy short story.

Arrival comes from director Denis Villeneuve, who did my beloved Sicario, and it is an amazing movie. Amy Adams is the lead, playing linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks who gets involved in something beyond everyone. When several mysterious, floating alien ships appear in seemingly random places around the globe, Dr. Banks gets drafted by the government to assist in understanding the big question: Why are they here?

She works along with military liaison Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). That’s right, Lois Lane and Hawkeye working together, calm down. The alien language is odd, and unlike anything on Earth. Not only that, but their written language is bizarre, seeming to represent a different way of thinking about time. While Louise leads a team to learn the language of the aliens, the world reacts.

As might be expected, there is fear and worry, and there is a concern that hardliners in the Chinese government, lead by General Shang (the great character actor Tzi Ma) may take a preemptive strike against the aliens. The movie uses this as another way to build tension, an ending of potential disaster against hope.

But the movie sides with hope and doing your best if even you know you may have hardship coming. The film plays with your own perspective and time, showing Louise as a narrator, discussing her work at times as though talking to an audience, one revealed to be her daughter. But the mysteries of this are kept throughout the movie, building a crescendo of emotion to hit you hard as the movie ends. Or at least it did that for me.

Ultimately the movie has a strong message of hope and humanity coming together to face an uncertain future, dealing with an alien visit with a paranoid and worried world perhaps not handling it that well. In a world of uncertainty, there is a universal strength to that message, one where we focus on making the world better, and living despite knowledge that we will live through pain, loss, and death. We live because we experience the great things too, the joy, the love, the triumph. Science isn’t magic, and sci-fi isn’t inherently a brilliant genre. But it can serve to show, via the genre and the metaphors within, a better look at ourselves and a better possibility for tomorrow.

This movie, with a career best performance from Amy Adams and some of the best visuals you’ll see all year, is emotional, interesting, and flows with perfect pace. And the score is pretty good too. The movie does challenge you a bit with the way the story flows, but it all comes together, in a way a bit clearer than the original short story. I think people will be able to handle it. And thus, it’s one of my more highly recommended movies of the year.