BEFORE: Welcome back to Day 3 of the world's first and only Michael Stuhlbarg Film Festival, as he carries over again from "Miles Ahead". This ran on cable starting about a month ago, so I didn't have to dip into the Academy screeners pile again, I'll save that for tomorrow.
But I wanted to get this one worked in this year, not next, because spoilers - plus I've been very curious about it, this film got so much buzz last year - or was it early this year, during awards season? I figure if I already watched "The Fifth Wave" this year, and I'm also planning on watching "Independence Day: Resurgence" PLUS a few notable alien invasion films during October, I should also include this one, because that will make for a better wrap-up on this topic when the year is over.
I had an internal debate about adding "Rush" to this year's list, because that's another Chris Hemsworth film, which will not only give him an edge over his brother Liam when I start totaling up 2017's appearances, but also removes a potential link to next year's "Avengers: Infinity War". I've had the same problem 3 times this week, watching "Arrival" with Jeremy Renner and"Miles Ahead" with Don Cheadle and "Labor Day" with Josh Brolin means three fewer potential links to that film. But I can't concern myself with that right now, I've got to finish this year the best way that I can - plus "Infinity War" has a HUGE cast with many notable actors - I'm sure I'll find another way to link to it somehow.
THE PLOT: When twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world, linguistics professor Louise Banks is tasked with interpreting the language of the alien visitors.
AFTER: This is a very tough film to review, especially if, like me, you're in the habit of trying to avoid spoilers. Note that I said "trying" - because it may be impossible to talk about this film without giving something important away, so if you haven't seen this one yet, stop reading now, or pause and go see it and come back, whichever. I think I could talk about OTHER films that "Arrival" seemed to liberally borrow from, and then maybe I can be all around it without being right on it. OK? (And if you haven't seen the films that I'm about to reference, either, please stop reading, or go out and watch them and come back.)
The first obvious reference is to "2001: A Space Odyssey", a film that is still driving people (like my boss) mad, because they don't understand the ending. What's to understand? I saw a guy reading the "2001" novel on the subway platform the other day, and I was tempted to go up to him and say, "I know the ending - the monolith did it!" but I resisted. That would not have been cool. Seriously, though, Dave Bowman gains mastery over time and space and becomes the cosmic starchild, is that so difficult to process? Sure, Kubrick got all "arty" with it, showing him as an old man, then a fetus and so on, but the message seems pretty clear to me. Whatever the monolith is - a cosmic guardian, a vessel for an advanced cosmic being, a time machine, an evolution aide - you can learn more about it by reading Arthur C. Clarke's follow-up novels, "2010", "2061" and "3001". I have, and it's a shame that nobody seems to be making "2061" into a movie right now, probably because nobody truly understands the first two films. Again, I blame Kubrick for screwing it up - I've always liked the film "2010" with John Lithgow, Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren, better anyway. "Arrival" has some cool spaceship that sort of calls the monolith to mind.
The second reference is to Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five", one of my favorite books. In that story (made into a film in 1972) Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck" in time and is able to travel through the past events of his life, which ends up playing out before us like one of these bio-pics of Miles Davis or James Brown, so we get to see all the ironic connections between events in the past, present and future. Late in the book/film it's revealed that Pilgrim was (possibly) abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who put him in an alien zoo and eventually gave him mastery over space and time, which justifies the time-jumping through his life. Now, whether you believe in these aliens, or you assume that Billy Pilgrim has gone crazy or was brain-damaged somehow, that's up to you.
The next obvious reference is to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", one of the classic "alien contact" films, which I saw during its initial release in 1977. In that film aliens had been abducting humans since the 1950's, all in an effort to obtain our advanced entertainment technology, because they were apparently in dire need of some sort of cosmic nightclub. But it wasn't until the 1970's that such technology existed, and once we built the aliens a discotheque on top of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and started communicating with them via a Moog synthesizer, that the two races were able to understand each other. Let's face it, the 1970's were a very strange time.
I don't want to leave out "Contact", another film based on one of my favorite books, this one written by Carl Sagan. In that story, the aliens communicate with us via our own old TV transmissions, and the first one of any note that was broadcast to space happened to be the 1936 Olympics - so the aliens' first transmission back to us, by way of saying "hello", happened to be footage of Adolf Hitler. Way to make a first impression, aliens. Naturally people on Earth started freaking out for fear that there might be Nazis in space (side idea for a possible future film - "Astro-Nazis". Or maybe "Cosmo-Nazis"?) - and it's worth noting that this little plot point was in the novel, but did not appear in the 1997 film, which chose to focus instead on what the existence of aliens meant to human religion. And when the aliens did finally appear to the main character, they took the form of her father, which was a cheap way to gain her trust, if you ask me.
Finally, I want to reference the 2 TV shows I've been watching lately, "Twin Peaks" and "11.22.63", which both are connected to time-travel. (At least, I THINK the finale of "Twin Peaks" had some time travel in it...) After all, if you can travel between worlds, the distances are so great that you're not just traveling through space, but also through time... "11.22.63" is all about a man traveling back to try to prevent the JFK assassination, and in "Twin Peaks", Cooper had to make one final play to try to save Laura Palmer, which meant going back to the day she was killed. But there's a problem here where time travel is concerned, which is that if you go back to prevent something from happening, and you succeed, then there's no version of you that was aware of the bad thing that would then go back to prevent it. So you end up caught in a time-loop, where the bad thing happens, then it doesn't, then it does again, or something like that. So you can't ever succeed in changing the past, or more likely, you can't travel back in time in the first place, except in fiction.
There would be similarities to other alien films, such as "Independence Day" or "Signs" or "The War of the Worlds", if you want to believe that these aliens in "Arrival" are here to take over - but are they? How do we know that they're not here to fix global warming, or end famine, or just maybe to borrow a cup of uranium or something? Ah, language. If only there were a linguistics expert available who could try to understand them in a race against the clock, one who also happens to be easy on the eyes and in need of a purpose in her life. Wait, we might know just the person...
But even though it borrows liberally from the films above, I think it managed to take all those elements and blend them together in a new, innovative way. And for a film that's very flashback-y and non-linear, which usually drives me crazy, that sort of turned out to have a real purpose here, kind of like the engine driving the car, rather than being the car itself. I'm not sure about the "aliens-ex-machina" ending, but it did make me want to go back and watch the film a second time to see what I might have missed. Plus, it's such a darn elegant film, even in its subversive structure.
There, I think that I've pretty much told you everything, without telling you anything at all. I hope you're now as intrigued as I was.
Also starring Amy Adams (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Forest Whitaker (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Mark O'Brien, Tzi Ma.
RATING: 7 out of 10 cans of Play-Doh
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