Arrival

When a subject regarding time, aliens and space is made into motion pictures, it's hard to escape the profound influence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. One such example is Arrival, after Christopher Nolan's daring Interstellar.

Amy Adams plays Louise Banks, an expert linguist, and oh boy, was she good in what she does! There're no ways one would not like this persona. 'Joe Alien' & the kangaroo story are instances to show how witty she is! The writing has explicit scenes to grow her character throughout the course of the screenplay. First, we could see her curiosity being stirred via the breaking headlines, before heightening to peak after listening to the internal recording. It automatically launches her ticket into an incident of, what we may call as historic! Through her reduced hand jitters from sessions after sessions, you could say she's getting braver. Her grounds are stabilizing, preparing her to encounter & unlock the secret behind the arrival.

The first few minutes of mother-daughter relationship is touching, and at the same time, leaves you wondering for the purpose of its inclusion in the science fiction. It becomes even more true when the screenplay spills fragments of images throughout. Once the story progresses toward the emergency alert, urgency can be felt creeping into your consciousness. What is the huge mystery about? What is this nervousness tingling inside us? Despite revealing the spacecrafts in posters & trailers, the makers did manage to instil the suspense very well. The emptiness, the panic in pictures are spread across the globe, which we are glad for, that the aliens did not target New York alone like every single time.

The script has practical character interactions & purpose of emergence, with Jeremy Renner's Ian Donnelly & our protagonist. The initial spark is nice; a sweet disagreement of its sort. There's a plausible, tangible reason for the pair to exist & investigate together: questions and translations. There's also a verbal hint onto saying someone else was in the job prior, before it arrived to Louise's doorstep. However, at certain parts of the screenplay, the speed could have been adjusted to avoid minimal boredom. The computer graphics should have been better as well.

In this memorable celluloid, Denis Villeneuve sucks you into a first timer's experience in meeting unearthly entities so bloody well! From losing & confronting anti-gravity to the spaceship entrance and the suffocation in decontamination suit, the occurrences are captured maximally real & freakish! The sound editing lends a big hand in making this work, big time! Just listen to Louise's hard breaths, or the switch in audio source when the heli-mic is turned on. And good Lord, the sound design for the squid-like structured heptapods! Eerie to the core!

If there's one scene that should protest your blinking, it must be the long, wide take arresting the first look at the UFO vessel in a fantastic imagery format! The background score that accompanies it convinces that this is one of the best clips ever shot in 2016. We can't help but to sit in awe when the entire episode of language decoding comes into play. Exchanging & expanding the heptapods' vocabulary, deciphering & decrypting the foreign tongue, recognizing the patterns in a seismographic complexity, and explaining the way the sentences are written with both hands left & right as language, like time is a palindrome is mind-blowing to every syllable of the word! The picture truly explored the beauty of language & writings like no other!

Communication inside the aliens' chamber is the biggest mindfuckery in the film! Time, as contrary to popular belief, is a palindrome, not linear. If you know the ending of something, you know how the beginning would be. And unlike in linearity, things can't be changed just because humans are able to see the future occurrences. What's meant to happen, will happen, by hook or by crook. It's just that the new language is the tool that could help us see the future happenings, that's all. This is a crucial fact for the aliens to be on Earth in the first place; to pass on the knowledge to the next smart existential, so that help would come back to the aliens in 3000 years, just like the present day of vice versa. There is a reason why they say history always repeats itself. Now we know, Arrival means waiting for the incident that's about to advent.

The only flaw associated with this great twist would be the scene where General Shang (Tzi Ma) gives away his personal number to Louise, stating: "This I must do without understanding or know why." This is so out of context, as it is such a forced event to conclude the story. No one gives away their phone number without knowing why, let alone the enforcement leader of China!