Arrival - Liked It

Stars:  Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker 
Run Time: 1 hour, 56 minutes

​Starring Amy Adams as Louise Banks and Jeremy Renner as Ian Donnelly, the two work together to understand and communicate with an alien species that arrives on Earth randomly. Being aliens, the countries in which they land are on edge, not knowing what is going to happen, if anything happens at all. Louise is a renowned linguistics professor at a university and is tasks with trying to communicate with the species aboard the space crafts. To begin, she rights words on a dry erase board, and the creatures (known as heptapods by the humans) respond to her in their was of communication: circular sentences that look a lot like ink blots.
 
After some time, Louise is able to communicate and understand what they are saying fully, but tension is high when they use the word “weapon.” Now, we all know – especially from texting – that sometimes things can be taken out of context. The army and a bunch of other countries get this same sentence and immediately think that the heptapods are going to attack the Earth. Louise however, is not convinced that they are harmful and needs more context to fully understand what they are doing on Earth. At one point in the movie she is put inside the chamber with the heptapods to have a one on one conversation with them. Then, she understands, and must convince the rest of the world.

• I liked the cinematography of this film, the shots of the landscape in each scene and the inclusion of the space ship were nice to look at.
• I liked Amy Adams in her role. It was evident that she truly wanted to understand the species and that she developed feelings for them.
• I am not too sure how I feel about her dreams (which I guess technically were premonitions) because I don’t understand how they fit into the movie.
• <SPOLIER> I didn’t like the aliens, squid-like creatures are really creepy, so the fact that these aren’t dangerous is kind of contradictory. But I’m glad that they were only there to help humans and not to harm them.
• I liked that his alien movie went in a different direction than most. I was waiting for them to attack the whole time, but this film was entirely about communicating with them and making an alliance. <END SPOILER>

​I would be interested to read the short story that this movie is based on: Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I love a good science fiction film, and though this was not exactly what you would expect from an alien movie, it was very interesting to watch. Boring at times, it was still able to keep my attention and Amy Adams really carried it through to the end. I’m going to give this movie a “Liked It” rating. It was extremely interesting and the suspense of it kept me wanting more after each scene. The story was a great one to watch and I recommend it to our viewers.