Arrival Is Still Denis Villeneuve’s Best Sci-Fi Film

With anticipation of the upcoming sci-fi sequel Dune: Part 3 reaching the stratosphere, it feels like director Denis Villeneuve has very nearly reached the status of Christopher Nolan, or at least Nolan somewhere around his Dark Knight Rises era. Like Nolan, Villeneuve is a semi-outsider who has made a bunch of distinctive American studio films, often bringing a sense of physical and emotional heft to sensation-driven genres, dabbling in the franchise world, while seemingly working up towards making a movie in full IMAX. Villeneuve, though, can lord one thing over his spiritual predecessor: His movie Arrival is oriented around a female lead in a way that none of Nolan’s work so far has pulled off. It also happens to be Villeneuve’s best sci-fi film.

Arrival, which was released 10 years ago this week, is nominally an alien-invasion narrative where a dozen spacecrafts show up at various sites around the Earth, prompting global alarm. But rather than setting about destroying various landmarks, the creatures inside the ships attempt to communicate with the humans who investigate them, including linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams). Much of the film simply follows the process of Louise piecing together how to translate a language operating on a vastly different plane from any Earth natives.

Though it’s based on the sci-fi short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, in some ways Arrival more closely resembles the American crime movies Villeneuve made before it, like Prisoners and Sicario, rather than the sci-fi material he tackled afterward, like Blade Runner 2049 and the Dune trilogy. As the film follows the expert Louise into a situation she’s nonetheless initially unprepared to navigate, with plenty of interagency conflict and shadowy imagery, Arrival sometimes moves in parallel with Sicario in particular, where Emily Blunt’s FBI agent is drawn into a morally murky special operation that aims to bring down a drug cartel.

But while that movie characterized Blunt’s character almost entirely by her actions in the immediate moment, Arrival immediately unveils another major part of Louise’s life, at least in fragments. The movie opens with a montage of moments, often shot in close-up, showing Louise parenting a daughter, then losing her to a rare medical condition before the girl grows up.

These are small moments for Villeneuve, who specializes in a scale and weight that give Sicario and Prisoners such a menacing tone — only shy of despairing because of their momentum as thrillers — and make his Dune movies so distinctively IMAX-ready. Despite the Earthlings’ fears, Arrival contains no scenes of battle or destruction. However, it still taps into that sense of enormity in the procedurally-based scenes of Louise and the others who have been recruited to work with the aliens, including physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), entering the long passage leading to a cavernous chamber within the ship where they will interface with the heptapods, multi-tentacled creatures that communicate primarily by writing smoky signals in the air. Gravity lessens in the tunnel, allowing the humans to leap into a hard perpendicular.

Arrival isn’t lacking in these moments of effects-assisted wonder. (The ships themselves, hovering above the ground, have a totemic 2001-ish look.) But while cinematographer Bradford Young gives the movie a foggy-dawn, autumnal earthiness, the film’s mood is less oppressively gloomy than Villeneuve’s other forays into both human drama and science fiction. Though Blunt is our entry point into Sicario, the movie (driven by a Taylor Sheridan screenplay) ultimately wants to emphasize her frustration, relative helplessness, and smallness in the story’s greater context. This can be more interesting thematically than dramatically, making the character more obviously subservient to the film’s aims.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But Arrival stands out from both the physical bigness of a Dune movie and the human scale of Sicario by zeroing in on the decisions Louise makes, both professionally and personally. Those are conveyed quietly, through Adams’ no-nonsense yet interior performance, perfectly divided between what she experiences in the moment and what increasingly (and silently) runs through her head. As Louise works toward communication with the aliens, she finds herself haunted by images of her daughter, briefly unsticking her in time. The movie builds to a major turn at the three-quarters mark: Learning the alien language is teaching Louise to experience time in a non-linear fashion, as the heptapods apparently do. The daughter we might have assumed to be part of her backstory is actually her future.

This revelation makes Arrival fragmentary by nature; there aren’t any single scenes between Louise and her daughter that last longer than a minute or so, in contrast with some of the mesmerizing extended scenes of the team making their way up to the aliens and fumbling toward common ground. It’s within these smaller pieces that the movie finds a precise form of emotionality that eludes so many sci-fi movies, whether they’re aiming for something cooler, outright chillier, or more sentimental. It also strikes a balance between the different scales and tones of Villeneuve’s other work, related but clearly apart from it.

Back in 2016, Arrival was received as a hopeful movie in the aftermath of a particularly divisive presidential election, presumably because it ultimately shows Louise forging a connection with other countries in order to calm the panic and hostility that threatens the aliens. Yet, as with her decision to move forward and have her child despite knowing the loss that she knows will follow, there’s a bittersweetness to this conclusion she can only reach because she experiences snatches of a non-linear time. Villeneuve’s film ruminates on the choices that may feel as if they can’t be fully articulated in traditional language, while using the speculative flexibility of science fiction to nudge the audience toward considering an experience that might seem impossible.

Villeneuve’s Dune and Blade Runner movies make nominally more fun use of the sci-fi genre but they still seem programmed to court viewers who self-consciously blanch at Star Wars-style silliness, and exist, to some degree, in the shadow of a popular book series and a towering classic of the genre. Arrival feels less self-conscious about its seriousness, less like it’s striving to impress. A recurring image in the film is Adams with her back to the camera, staring at or approaching some kind of blindingly bright light. That’s the brilliance of Arrival, especially as a sci-fi movie: a vividly rendered human approaching something not quite knowable.

Arrival is streaming on Paramount+.