This is one of the most fascinating stories I have seen adapted to the cinema by non other than the prolific and wonderful Denis Villeneuve. Arrival is one of those movies that you'll never finish praising 'cause every time you think about the plot, it'll seem incredible that this type of story came from a person and not from a heptapod itself. It's based on Ted Chiang's 1998 short story called Story of your Life.
Let's start with the technical details. The general aesthetic that Villeneuve and his team want to impose is a simplistic and minimalist one. The direction and the cinematography are a fantastic mix. It's a simple display that plays with open shots, geometric and symmetrical sequences, close-up shots of the characters, out-of-focus shots and a color palette to synchronize with the emotions displayed. All this hints at an intimate, dreamlike and reflective tone. The late Icelandic composer Jóhannsson was able to connect perfectly with the ideas of the director Villeneuve, Chiang and the screenwriter Heisserer, and proposed deep and disturbing dissonances, but beautiful and subtle in keeping with the nature of the aliens in the film.
Now back to the story, it's really cool. It challenges our perception of linear time as we know it, its entanglements with our memory and its far-reaching effects on our deepest emotions that ultimately make us human. There is no other movie where it doesn't make better sense to start playing with the timeline of its characters' history than this one. And not only that, but it also has the luxury of taking this game, looking at it, analyzing it, molding it and rearranging it to give us a work of art that you need a few seconds with your head on one side to fully understand it, and when you do it, there is no neuron left without receiving the most electrifying stimulus of their nanometric lives. As if that were not enough, this science fiction story presents us with a new linguistic puzzle with which it rethinks the way we see life itself. It's just an insanely good movie.
You have to see it without distractions, with a fresh and rested mind.
