Setting Itself Apart From Other Alien Films, “Arrival” Appeals To Our Inner Linguistic Nerd

While finding myself in Boston post-apocalypse election, I went to the movies to see Moonlight (yes there’s a review on the way, and yes, I still believe that’s the best film of the year) with a group of friends with the Arrival poster hanging over us. My good friend Simone and I both eyeballed this poster and shared the same sentiment (the one where steam begins to rise from the peak of one’s head) and stated, “That better not be like fucking Contact.” Well, Arrival is not Contact. Not in plot resolution or endgame frustration, anyway. What Arrival does is give you a pretty full theoretical world that includes good writing, some cool nerdery, mostly good performances, and a big plot twist that mostly pulls it off. Arrival shares some similarities with other “the aliens are here but they won’t tell us why” films from before, but the scope and grounded purpose separate it from convention. The film’s protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is a linguist (and one of the best in the country, apparently) and a college professor at the time of the alien arrival, as twelve inexplicable spacecraft of some sort are placed around the world with no warning. Eventually, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) comes to recruit her as the aliens are trying to communicate with humans to no avail.

This not a Day the Earth Stood Still or Independence Day kind of invasion flick, but much more rooted in theoretical science and what-if scenarios more akin The Martian or Interstellar. If we had to fi…