Arrival (2016)

The arrival of twelve spaceships causes worldwide panic. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are brought into a military team tasked with determining what the aliens want. Each day they can enter a ship and confront the mutli-tentacled aliens behind a glass wall and try and work out some form of communication. Time becomes an issue when China declares war on the ship within their boarders. And during all of this, Louise is recalling the tragic death of her daughter.

Let me approach Arrival on a tangential road and discuss the indie, drama film-look, which can also be considered the film festival drama-look. Developed in the last twenty years, the look includes a loose camera, often including shaky cam. Closeups are the norm, but even on medium shots a single individual is dominate. Angles may shift wildly, keeping only part of the body in view: an elbow, the right side of the face, a hip and leg. Focus will drift in and out. It uses natural lighting with a subdued color pallet and a high amount of grain. Editing is “slow,” with long lingering shots, hanging on seconds longer than you’d expect in a big budget film. Yet cuts can be sudden, with intermediate steps missing; that is, we spend a protracted moment with a character when he is starting to walk, and then suddenly jump to him arriving at his destination. Sound tends to edge toward natural, but slightly more muffled and chaotic.

The main reason the indie drama-look developed was because it is cheap. But there are cheaper ways to go. This particular low-cost style caught on because it has an artistic use. How a film is shot says something (just as it matters what words you use in a story). And this look conveys things directly to the audience so they do not have to be explained. It declares that the scenes we are seeing are close to reality. There’s no magic here. It conveys the struggle of everyday life. It is distancing, which is useful if you want your audience to think more than feel. But while it tones down joy, excitement, and wonder, it is perfect for expressing melancholy. A typical indie drama might be about a single mother, stuck in a dead-end, low paying job, her dreams long gone, and now the father who abandoned her has returned because he is dying. There is not a lot of story, but rather just a few sad days in this woman’s life. And the indie film-look is exactly what you want for that story.

That’s enough independent film lecture. What’s my point? This style is appropriate to tell certain types of stories, say, ones about the bleak life of a drug addict or the dissolution of a marriage. It is not appropriate for extraterrestrial invaders, international intrigue, deep mysteries, and traitorous soldiers, even with a child dying of a cancer-like disease. All of those things, all except the child, call for excitement, wonder, sudden fear (instead of never-ending dread), hope, and even occasional humor. Arrival was made with all the wrong tools. It’s as if I asked for a realistic portrait but supplied only pastels or commissioned a heavy metal epic but would let the musicians use only unamplified accordions.

So a story that should have evoked a sea of emotions instead settles into mournful dread. That fits with the dying child, but everything has the same emotional resonance as that dying child. There’s a strong theme of accepting and enjoying what one can of life as everything ends, but while that comes across intellectually, the feeling I get from the film is, “Why bother?”

If you can ignore the style, the film has an engaging story, but only part of the time. For the first half we are gifted with stupid people who have never heard of foreign languages or seen a science fiction film. They hail it as brilliant when Louise does the old “Me Tarzan, you Jane” bit. You don’t need a linguist to have worked that out. Her idea to use written words and pictures for communication instead of just sounds is shocking to the rest of the team (I guess they never texted). To create inappropriate and unnecessary tension, the most basic concepts are fought by the military. Why do you want to try and figure out the basics of communication instead of just asking “What is your purpose on Earth?” I’d hate to see that guy on the first day of French class. “I’m sick of ‘I’ and ‘you.’ Why aren’t we reading Les Misérables?”

When Louise is just allowed to do her job, the story flows much better, even if everything is in a pool of ennui. The linguistic tricks and the tie-in with her daughter are clever and dramatic enough without the need for faux antagonisms and saber rattling. It feels like they started with a good script, but then didn’t trust it. Still, I think they had the correct writers, just the wrong director.

Arrival has been described as “smart science fiction,” and I suppose compared to Star Wars or Iron Man, it is. But that only makes it stand out more when it is dumb, and it is never that smart anyway. Iron Man can distract you from the silly science with razzle-dazzle action. Arrival has nothing but a semi-smart idea and a lot of gloom. This is a science fiction film as created by Sartre who had to express it with interpretive dance.