Arrival
I've loved movies for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I was obsessed with Winnie the Pooh, the Wizard of Oz, and any animated movie that Disney released. Whenever my parents watched a movie, I would sometimes join then in the fun and sit next to them on the couch. I will never forget the time I watched an alien movie called Signs. I’m pretty sure watching that movie scarred me for years (even though it wasn’t that scary), and for some time after I saw it, I was too afraid to be alone at night in the darkness of my room because I was convinced that an alien would come snatch me in the middle of the night. Today, I’m not really scared of alien movies anymore. Probably the best movie I’ve seen lately is Arrival, a movie that’s about aliens but not in the way one would typically expect of alien movies.
Arrival is a science fiction/mystery movie that was released on November 11, 2016, and stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker. The movie received a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 8 out of 10 stars on IMDB. Arrival was recently nominated for Best Picture and several other categories at the 89th Academy Awards. The main plot of the movie revolves around twelve alien spaceships that land at different locations around the world. The United States Military and the government, along with scientists, attempt to figure out why the aliens had landed on earth and what exactly they wanted from humans. Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics professor who has been whisked away to a spaceship site in Montana. While at the site, she has to find a way to communicate with the aliens and also has to decode their language.
When one sees that a movie revolves around aliens, he or she might expect it to be an intense, action-packed ride. Arrival is a slow burning movie in my opinion. The movie is never really intense, but it does rely on emotions and a race against time to make you interested in watching it. I thought the plotline was very interesting at first, and I was curious to see what the aliens were going to look like. The film starts off with an emotional bang by showing flashbacks of Amy Adam’s character raising her daughter, Emily, only to lose her to cancer when she’s a teenager. When the movie moves into the scenes where Louise Banks is in contact with the aliens, it’s confusing at first because of the aliens’ language (which consists of O’s connected to various other shapes). During the movie, you watch the team try to figure out what the aliens are really saying, and you might feel a little lost like I was the first time I watched it. Even if the aspect of the alien's language in the movie gets confusing, I would say just keep on watching because everything will make sense in the end (I'll talk about that here in a minute)
The storyline of Arrival gets a bit more
dramatic when certain countries around the world decide they want to attack the
aliens instead of taking a gentler approach to figuring out why they're on
Earth. Near the end of the movie, there is an important revelation that the
aliens give to Louise Banks which ties the whole film together. I'm not going
to give away any spoilers here, but when I first watched Arrival, I didn't
really understand the whole point of the movie until this certain part near the
end. It was one of those revelations that don't necessarily shock you, but it
will make you go, “Oh, now everything makes sense.”
The last few scenes of Arrival were the ones that truly affected my emotions. The events that occur in these scenes are, in my opinion, both sad and beautiful. I didn’t expect myself to tear up while watching this movie, but when those scenes came on and the score music starting playing, I found myself crying. I think the instrumental song that played during those parts added that emotional depth to the movie that tugs at your heart. I thought this movie was fantastic. Even though it’s not an action-packed movie, it makes you think about the way we as humans communicate with each other and about your choices in this life. One of the main ideas that Arrival is trying to put out there is, "If you could see your
whole life from start to finish, would you change things?" I can say that it definitely made me do a
little thinking of my own, and its effects definitely stuck with me long after
the credits rolled out. The last thing I want to mention about Arrival is that
its cinematography was very breathtaking and well done. The trailer honestly
doesn’t do the movie any justice because the only way to experience the
emotional depth of this movie is to watch it for yourself. I can honestly say
this is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while.
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