Arrival — Kat Manos
There have been plenty of excellent and memorable sci-fi films over the last decade. Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013) portrayed a space walk in ways we’ve never seen before—and in long single takes, no less. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) literally led astrophysicists to discovering brand new information about the nature of black holes in space. Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) envisioned life on Mars in a hyper-realistic setting that would’ve made Ray Bradbury jealous. And while all those films are entertaining, technical achievements in their own right, none of them touched me quite like Denis Villaneuve’s Arrival in 2016.
The French-Canadian director, most known for creating dark, psychological thrillers with beautiful color palettes and a measured tone, quickly became one of my favorite directors of the decade. Arrival, Villaneuve’s highest rated film and the only work that provided him with a nomination for Best Director from the Academy, tells the beautiful story of a linguistics professor (Amy Adams) enlisted by the U.S. Army and government to communicate with strange alien lifeforms who’ve come to Earth.
Arrival is a unique sci-fi film in that it takes place entirely on Earth, features an alien invasion where absolutely no major landmarks explode, and, most interestingly of all, focuses on the inner mind of a woman. In an age when most sci-fi films were preoccupied with the struggles of a man surviving thousands of miles above the atmosphere and battling the horrors of space, one of Arrival’s most climactic scenes includes Amy Adams holding up a white board in front of a swirl of black ink, hoping for it to respond to her.
With insanely stunning visuals (remember this extraordinary shot?), a haunting score, and probably Amy Adams’s greatest performance ever (despite not even receiving an Oscar nomination, unbelievably), Arrival plays with time, dream narratives, and language with staggering brilliance. Our protagonist may be trying to save all of humanity, but she doesn’t use a virus, alien tech, or militaristic warfare to do it. The film purports cosmopolitanism and political collaboration when it feels as if we all couldn’t disagree more on a global scale. But more than anything, Arrival is my favorite film of the decade because of all the sci-fi cliches it ignores. Instead, it embraces the importance of something simple like communication. Arrival makes me think more deeply and feel more emotions than perhaps any other sci-fi film in recent memory, and for that, it will always hold a special place in my heart.
