Movie Reviews # 39…
Arrival. Denis Villeneuve, dir. The ETs are called Heptapods, but they look like elongated octopi standing on their tippytoes. I’ve always been fascinated by the challenge of ET/human communication (see Sing a Samba Galactica—also available in other ebook formats—or the PDF free for the asking, “Portal in the Pines”), so you’d think this movie would be like a full glass of Jameson for me. 90% of it was. I’ll have to go read Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life” now to answer some questions. Yeah, OK, the ETs form of communication was via circles with fuzz, squirted out from those feet like octopis’ ink emissions. But why circles? And the fuzz looked very fractal, so can there really be information content there (there are data compression schemes that are fractal-based).
Amy Adams, who plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist, is a wee bit too fragile but does a pretty good job as main character, but not Oscar caliber as some critics claim. Jeremy Brenner plays Dr. Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist. It seems like Hollywood needs a romantic complement to a protagonist even when the sexes are reversed. I guess Ian’s needed to give the hugs the fragile Louise desperately needs? The rest of the cast is just so-so. At least they didn’t make the black guy (Forrest Whittaker) the villain—that job was handled by paranoid government leaders all around the world.
I’m still thinking about this one. The best two sci-fi movies of all time, Alien and Blade Runner, were also notable for their quiet, mysterious, and scary intensity. That’s all Arrival has going for it basically, but it’s well done (the score helps). The violence, unlike those two famous movies, is minimal. In that sense, it’s more like The Martian, although not nearly so scientific (and thankfully the Heptapods don’t grow potatoes). I’ll have to say that the intensity makes the time fly, and you’ll want to eat some popcorn instead of your nails. The movie certainly offers an important lesson: people will get creeped out when confronting something radically different. Some viewers said it “blew their mind.” (That is done with very few glitzy special effects, by the way, making me wonder why all the visual effects crews listed in the credits were necessary. Maybe I didn’t register their subtlety.)
Chiang’s novella was originally offered as a PDF like The Martian. I’ve started doing that too, mainly because I can’t afford to publish everything I write. It’s comforting that someone in Hollywood still reads original sci-fi literature. (Watched an old Star Trek episode I’d missed last Saturday—so much better than ones from the other series because it was written by a REAL sci-fi writer, not a wannabe screenwriter). I just wish some titles were changed: Arrival is even lamer than “Story of Your Life.” Titles are important, but writers seem to be hooked on lame ones recently.
In libris libertas!
