By Jack Kelly Business & Publishing Editor
Confused by the complexity of Arrival, I walked out of the Seaside Theater in Oregon. I was flustered. I’m not exactly the proverbial moron, but I struggled to understand the timeline, the thematic jumble, the complexity of the characters.
Then there’s the combination of time slips, aliens, and a complicated romance, which left me grasping to put together the pieces in the recently released and critically acclaimed film Arrival.
Did I even have the right to review this film?
Let’s consider the actual plot. When several alien spacecraft touchdown around the globe, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), an expert linguist, is recruited by the United States military to communicate with the unknown invaders. As global relations break down, Banks rushes to uncover who the invaders are before conflict breaks out.
But the movie grows progressively more esoteric as the many subplots force the audience to piece together the pasts, presents, and futures of the characters. Furthermore, like the television series Lost, the film offers us scenes, each of which contains a crucial detail to be assembled into the overarching story by the end of the film.
What makes it even more powerful is how clearly we are put into the perspective of Banks, the heroine of a deeply personal journey.
The themes moved me. Arrival addresses situations such as Bank’s grief over the death of her child and the ethics of giving birth to a newborn you know is going to die. When viewed through the lens of a plot that jumps around in time, the movie becomes an irresistible intellectual exercise that ends up drawing us into its complicated puzzle.
A complicated work of art.
Amy Adams does a fantastic job of playing Louise Banks, a linguist who is probably a bit too invested in her research. In her study of the language of the aliens later named Hheptapods, she begins to suffer visions that help her decrypt the utterly foreign symbols that the aliens use to communicate. As she grows more proficient in her understanding of the language, she begins to lose touch with reality. Adams plays the role to perfection. We see her mind wander as she falls deeper into her work, eventually leading to a complete mental breakdown.
Yet Arrival is not without its flaws.
The beginning and ending of the film are complex and engaging, but the middle act suffers from a lack of pacing. The discovery of the alien spacecraft and introduction of the main characters fill the beginning, while tension over military maneuvers carries us to the conclusion, which leaves a soggy middle — with Banks going through the routine of learning an impossible language, yada, yada, yada — we’ve seen this all before.
However, what the plot does well (except during that middle grind) is to juxtapose images of extraterrestrials we’ve often seen with fresh takes on the philosophical themes of childbirth and fear of the unknown.
And this is what makes the film ultimately soar among the films I’ve seen in my short lifetime. And it does this by throwing out the rulebook guiding most almost-good films, a rulebook that often sandbags a film and keeps it from lifting off.
There’s a crucial scene in the film — one you can see in any of the previews — that demonstrates this most clearly.
As Banks and the other scientists enter one of the spacecrafts for the first time, they experience anomalies in gravity that confuse them. Undeterred by their fears, they continue to progress down the hallway into an empty room with a screen. Two strange forms appear.
I was biting my nails by then — but my tension suddenly subsided as Banks raised her hand in greeting, and the strange form responded in an unknown visual language.
I’ve thought about that moment often. Why did the scene move me so much?
Is the hallway the traumatic Presidential election we’ve just gone through, the grueling college application process which never seems to end, my fears for the upcoming new year, perhaps my own future?
Is that why I connected so deeply with Banks in her journey?
Amy Adams, left, and Jeremy Renner arrive at the LA Premiere of “Arrival” at the Regency Village Theatre on Sunday, Nov. 6, 2016, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)