Arrival

A film in which ships come down at twelve points on Earth. Louise is a linguist. The army plays her a recording and asks her to transcribe it; she says it cannot be done and proposes going to the ship. They go inside. Behind a glass screen there are two beings, and the sound they make does not resemble a language. Then they write. Circular marks left in the air contain the beginning and the end of a sentence at once. From there the film is a work of decipherment. Word lists, test sentences, questions written on a board, and a dictionary that grows a little each time. Meanwhile the world tightens. Twelve countries share information and then stop; in one, a military response is being prepared. A word is mistranslated and the crisis comes out of that. What the narrative is interested in is not aliens but language: the film puts the idea that learning a language changes the way you think at its centre and builds its whole structure on it. The images of Louise's daughter are there from the start and the audience only understands what they are at the end. The information at the end is not a surprise but a rereading. On a second viewing the narrative says something else from the first minute. The source is a long story by Ted Chiang. The sound design and music are by Jóhann Jóhannsson; the film won an Academy Award for sound editing. Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker are in the cast. Denis Villeneuve directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants quiet, thinking science fiction. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action; the film takes place almost entirely in a tent and a room.