It’s best not to say much more about the plot, except that it is pure pleasure to feel it unfold. With help from a cynical Agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), they suit up and enter the craft to see if they can make contact. She arrives at the site with Ian Donnelly ( Jeremy Renner), a leading quantum physicist, to start the mission. Banks gets a visit from military intelligence, in the form of Colonel Weber ( Forest Whitaker), requesting her assistance as an expert linguist in investigating and attempting to communicate with whatever intelligence is behind the landing.
And nothing happens.Īs world governments struggle to sort out what this means - and as the people of those countries react by looting, joining cults, even conducting mass suicides - Dr. Louise Banks ( Amy Adams) has suffered an unthinkable loss, and that functions as a prelude to the story: One day, a series of enormous pod-shaped crafts land all over earth, hovering just above the ground in 12 locations around the world. The bittersweet feeling instantly settles over the whole film, like the last hour of twilight. The strains of Max Richter’s " On the Nature of Daylight" play over the opening shots of Arrival, which is the first clue for what’s about to unfold: that particular track is ubiquitous in the movies (I can count at least six or seven films that use it, including Shutter Island and this year’s The Innocents) and is, by my reckoning, the saddest song in the world. It deserves serious treatment as a work of art. Not only that, but Arrival is one of the best movies of the year, a moving, gripping film with startling twists and imagery.
Arrival is much more concerned with deep truths about language, imagination, and human relationships than any one political moment. But the story Arrival is based on - the award-winning novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang - was published in 1998, almost two decades ago, which indicates its central themes were brewing long before this year.
0 kommentar(er)
