Arrival (2016)

Does the will to live not dim a little whenever “The Nature of Daylight” starts playing? If I can just offer one helpful note to the producers of Hollywood and television: we hate this piece of music, it’s always been shit, stop using it.

Apparently, Denis Villeneuve had wanted to make a science-fiction film since he began his career as a director - a career of, let's say, unpredictable choices - and settled on this: aliens land on Earth and the US Army press-gangs the world’s top linguistics experts into figuring out how to talk to them, so "we" don’t have to start a war. The experts, led by Louise (played by Amy Adams) don’t really have to be asked twice, what with it being the biggest event in history, although from the dour mood of the Army you would think it was latrine duty. SF fans might remember elements of this from Ian Watson’s novel The Embedding. So they put on their astronaut suits for protection and pop round to meet the new neighbours. The film then follows their efforts to decode the Martian language and learn what message is being delivered. But let Max Richter’s bourgeois dirge serve as a warning that in this movie the message won’t be anything cool like “Submit, Earthlings!”

First some compliments in the classic review mode of scrupulously balanced fairness. Here they are: With the vertical black flying saucers as a visual cue, Arrival takes a lot of old “we are not alone” sci-fi ideas and turns them on their side - literally, as in, a black vertical flying saucer instead of a white horizontal one. The aliens have come neither to help us or destroy us but because in the future they’re the ones who are screwed and will eventually need our help, so they’re sensibly (or cynically) buddying up with us now. The scientific approach to communication with them leads to a recreation of the old televangelist huckster’s appeal “Touch the screen” and the whole use of the screen between the humans and the aliens is a nice meta-comment on the film we’re watching too. Screens are in almost every scene, in fact, along with phones – it’s a very Skype world and the deepest F2F conversation is between pale little Louise with the starey eyes and her tentacled space-friends. In an eerie contrast to the 1950s pulp adventure imagery, those scenes are like watching a minimalist play.

Some pretty heavy-handed lines are included for our thoughtful consideration, like Hannah’s name, and they're quite first-draft blunt - don't worry, you won't miss the significance of her name when it's directly spelled out for you. But the squid-ink circles with the weird noises show us the production team did admirably exhaustive work – dozens of different visual designs and bizarre sounds for each one! – so it feels a bit mean to roll our eyes at it. All the interactions between the two species have a floating dazed atmosphere and the patiently methodical science of trying to translate the ink circles has some echoes of great 70s sci-fi classics like the search for the cure in The Andromeda Strain (one of the first great “scientists in Haz Mat suits” movies) or the analysis of the ants in Phase IV.

It’s another clever cinematic idea to make us watch rather than just hear a language we don’t understand while the characters feel like they’re edging closer and closer to a breakthrough. Of course all their replies to the world-threatening aliens are risky guesses and they’ve no way to check what they just said. It could so easily go wrong. We could accidentally say “Hi, Martian. You is... very ugly? And... your mum... likes it up the bum? Up... the jacksie? Yes?” Followed by a smile and a thumbs up. “Professor, they’re firing at us!” That doesn’t happen and the Army are annoyingly paranoid in this film but I don’t blame them for not being persuaded to drop their guns by Amy Adams. In the end though, the strangers do want to reach out and touch – they want to make a connection IRL and not just keep texting us. Villeneuve wants to touch us too but either we’re out of reach or he doesn’t quite stretch far enough.

So, that was the pro column. The problem with Arrival is that it plays it, not just straight, but indie art-movie festival straight. And it doesn’t work. This is a movie about aliens, Mr Villeneuve, aliens. But the film seems convinced that doing it this way is its greatest strength. Keeping it real will draw us into a mood of gravitas and earnestness and pathos. What actually happens is that the more solemnly it tries to pseudo-realistically depict the paraphernalia of military responses and the urgent scientific protocols and the frazzled tension of it all, the harder it is to believe. 

If one thing sinks it, it is simply this: we've all seen Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. When I think of Spielberg’s breathless and irresistible enthusiasm with the same material, and his natural sense of humanity, the comparison is deadly to Arrival  - people actually smile in Close Encounters. They also have normal lives and they argue and go off the rails and freak out. OK, 1970s Spielberg is an unfair comparison for anyone. But even Christopher Nolan would probably have done a better job than Villeneuve; in fact, he basically does in Interstellar. Both films are about the same thing – parent-daughter relationship heightened by timewarp turns out to be the key to saving the world – but Nolan makes it look comparatively effortless. With Villeneuve, there’s plenty of effort - which is sadly counter-productive.

Aliens meet humans - what makes us human? This was enough for Spielberg. Time travel was enough for Nolan. Villeneuve, the over-reaching idiot, wants to ram both together in one movie. The time-warp stuff here is more or less fine, it makes as much sense as it needs to make. In fact, any power the film has comes from the time-loop and the fatalistic sense of Groundhog Day without the laughs. But the gravity is mostly lost, like the characters in the tunnel bobbing around weightless in a vacuum that keeps dragging them back to those sodding aliens. To the question, "now that we've discovered aliens, what is the essence of being human?" Villeneuve plainly hasn’t thought of an answer. He has fancy philosophy-class answers but so what? He doesn't have artistic answers. There’s no psychology in Arrival. There’s no personal weakness – the crushing weight of the world crisis doesn’t leave any room for them or any time for them. There’s a sort of sterilized lack of earthiness to everyone in it, all plodding about in a humourless daze. And it seems fairly evident that that’s what Villeneuve is going for. 

What he wants is a majestically daunting experience to contrast the anti-septic modern world with the mystical wonders we could discover if only we weren't so, oh, so misguided, so glued-to-our-phones, etc. When Arrival sacrifices normal human behaviour to get this rigid effect, it is aesthetically failing its own theme. It gives up the surprises of what characters, and actors, might do spontaneously and forgoes plausible intimacy and real urgency. Because Arrival doesn’t want us to respond to it like that. It doesn’t believe ordinary people are surprising enough. It wants us to be paralysed with dread, impressed with its seriousness and realism, over-awed, deeply moved by the existential implications of a cerebral conceit, and persuaded to go back over all the little easter egg details like boring nerds, in that order. It wants those things so badly that it overdoes every single one of them. Actually I don’t even know if there are any easter-eggs but I bet there are.

Being released in 2016 there’s also a distinct feeling that they hoped the audience might walk out going “I now think an American woman is the best person to save the world with love and harmony”. There’s even a bit of silly Hollywood-liberal parochialism that implies Rush Limbaugh was a horseman of the apocalypse. Never mind that Hillary would have told the generals in classic Aliens mode to “nuke them from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” and she would have been talking about the rest of Earth.

Arrival has its originality and it does combine some really mysteriously spooky images with philosophical themes of the kind people sometimes say, or even believe, they want American films to do more often. It is certainly clever in the way the plot plays with time but, if cleverness is the best thing about a film, it’s never going to be one of the greats and it’s going to take a lot of wilfully contrived argument from its fans to get it canonised. I'm sure there are many layers of meaning and they have chin-stroking consequences if you follow them through. But whatever you do, it’s still a movie about space-squid from UFOs and no amount of philosophy or stony-faced acting and low-frequency sonic vibration is going to make us feel like we’re somehow watching a cross between Persona and Downfall get photo-bombed by aliens.

If some glimmer of Attic insight flickers briefly within Arrival, it is to no avail when all Villeneuve can do with it is play a bit of sad music. “Come back to me” says Louise to her kid’s corpse with “The Nature of Daylight” blandly droning away. At the end, back again comes that modern masterpiece. In honour of this time loop conclusion: Does the will to live not dim a little whenever “The Nature of Daylight” starts playing?