Of all the appalling injustices exacted by the Golden Globe nominations earlier this week (wot, no Kate Beckinsale?! Aaron Taylor-Johnson for Nocturnal Animals not Michael Shannon?!) the lack of nominations for Arrival seemed among the most baffling. Granted the two it did pick up were in the areas in which Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral sci-fi shines the brightest: Amy Adams’s leading role, plus the score. But still. Really no recognition for Eric Heisserer’s extraordinary screenplay (adapted from Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life)? The direction? Or just for being a damn fine drama?
Arrival is a movie for which prejudices about the genre, or qualms about the premise (Adams is a linguist who translates for newly landed aliens), might have had you lowering your expectations. You come out with mind blown, nails absent and tissue supply severely depleted. Yes, it’s set among space beasties, but it is a movie absolutely about the human condition, about how we choose who to love and how to love them.
It is a thriller featuring helicopters and Forest Whitaker shouting, but it is never ever dumb, only gripping. And it is by far the most thoughtful release this year. It informs and explores ideas subconsciously common to us all about our interplay with language, and the past and the future. In what it suggests about how we experience time in a much more non-linear fashion than most conventional narratives, it is, I think, overwhelming. We are stuck in shuffle, says Heisserer, we do not pass through forever in the present.
Everyone, everything seems elevated by a movie about which there is something intangible, miraculous. Even Jeremy Renner seems much less slappable than usual (though concerns about the ethics and plausibility of the actions of his character in the final reel do persist). Best of all is that sound design (never words I thought I’d write): Jóhann Jóhannsson’s alarming brass and booms that herald the arrival of the spaceships and, best of all, the Max Richter piece, On the Nature of Daylight, which bookends the film. The whole amounts to something transcendent; something to reignite your excitement for cinema, for life.