Arrival, 2016.

Arrival, set in a barely distant future has a central theme of unfolding deep truths about language, imagination and human relations. It is based on “Story of Your Life,” a short story written by Ted Chiang in 1998. It is a smart, gripping, logical, twisty yet serious movie that you may or may not understand completely in the first watch. Something similar to The Matrix, but very different.

In the beginning of the film, we find out that the protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks has suffered a very tragic loss and this functions as a prelude to the entire plot of the film.

One day, 12 2D elliptical crafts or half oval shaped UFOs land over 12 different parts of Earth, hovering just a few feet above the ground. Nobody knows why. The governments from all over the world are trying to communicate with each other with whatever little information they have found out and figure out what this means. Military intelligence visits Dr. Banks and requests her to translate whatever the unknown being was trying to communicate.

Working with the military and a physicist, Ian Delloner, Dr. Banks embarks on this journey seeking to find an answer to two very simple questions: Why are they here? And what do they want? She eventually finds out that visual communication is a better way for them to understand each other and a lot of what they said started making sense suddenly. As she gets closer to asking the big question, the world’s uneasiness with the government taking so much time to uncover what is happening, increases and people start riots, protests and forming cults.

I won’t talk much about the plot because it’s pure pleasure to watch the story unfold. For a movie with so many complex ideas and concepts, it shows only what’s important and you can’t make sense till the very ending when all the pieces begin to fit. Its one of the most extraordinary films directed by Denis Villeneuve and scripted by Eric Heisserer. Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner have once again showed us how flexible they are as actors and this movie has just made me like them even more.

The movie shows us how a simple thing that we take for granted such as language, actually plays a major role in our lives. It shows us that more than words, perception of the object is crucial to effective communication. For example, when we talk about colors, until we specify what particular shade we are talking about, no one would understand completely. Take Blue for instance, till the time we do not specify teal or sky blue or cobalt blue, everyone will only think of the color blue.

Alternatively, till the time we don’t have words specifying a particular emotion, we will use the same word for different emotions. For instance, a grin and a smirk are both 2 types of smiling but we have a different image of a person in our mind when use either of the words.

The film has a lot to offer to those who can think out of the box and it is definitely worth watching atleast to the bare minimum once or maybe a few hundred times… I would like to end this post with a quote from the movie;

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”

Dr. Louise Banks.