Movie Review – Arrival

Arrived, has it?

Denis Villeneuve is one of the directors I had neither heard of nor watched. It’s amazing to see that surprises are still in store for me. Somehow, I have not even watched his famous films like ‘Sicario’ or ‘Prisoners’ but finally I got to watch ‘Arrival’ which felt too much Nolanisque seeing the poster. That made me remember the reason why I avoided the move in theatres when it got released. If I was shown the poster of ‘Gravity’ and ‘Arrival’ and asked to find out which is which at a quick rate, I don’t think I’d be even able to do that.

In a way ‘Gravity’ worked, because I was able to decode it. But that was the only thrill of the movie. Alfonso Cuarón is capable of much more. I couldn’t come to a conclusion like that because I had not watched other movies of Villeneuve. So strictly speaking from ‘Arrival’s’ point of view, it was pretty average. The problem with the film was, it was sandwiched in between the commercial explosion of ‘Inception’ and an artistic exuberance of ‘Stalker’ or a ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. But I’ll take a less famous example to be precise. Even though I didn’t like ‘Interstellar’, it was so much fun. It was superbly packaged and sold as high-grade stuff. On the other hand, a film like ‘Solaris’ works so much on an emotional level. It was like music where it hits you note by note whereas ‘Interstellar’ is a mere exercise. ‘Arrival’ struggled to be either.

The movie starts with a mother daughter duo in the world of their own and the story then jumps to a spaceship with aliens. The fact that it had Jeremy Renner made the film look less serious. But Amy Adams was terrific in her role of a distressed individual. She could give a tough competition to Jessica Chastain who did a prolific job in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’. One of my favorite female characters on screen. To play characters like these, it’s important to immerse yourself in the screen. That’s what method actors can do so brilliantly, like how Kamal did in ‘Dasavathaaram’ for the role of Govind, a bio-scientist in the film.

It was a clever idea to use language in front of science and that was done so wonderfully well. But the heptapods coming to earth and the whole nation being against it was just another unglamorous ‘Avatar’ where we were forced to hate ourselves. Wish the story had been multidimensional and made us skeptic of the Heptapods too instead of making us blindly support it. Dennis had made a conscient decision to not explode in the screenplay. There is no aftermath scene for even a single sequence. Generally, a scene like the one where the bomb explodes and the leads escape, there would be an emotionally high scene where the leads shout out about their opinion. But here its all subtle. Thus, making it realistic. May be that’s how the situation actually might be if the aliens come for real. You can’t rule out anything nowadays you see.

Guess most of the opinion towards the movie would be because of how Nolan has spoilt us by making interesting space movies. Every time we see the mother daughter duo here, we can’t help but compare ‘Interstellar’s’ father daughter duo. The master that he is, Nolan makes it work like magic. Here it’s more subdued.

In the climax there would be an expectation to know what really was uttered by Louise (Amy Banks) to General Shang (Tzi Ma) but we don’t get to know it. That’s one of the scenes which totally didn’t work for me. It was like ‘adhuku ne saripatu varamatae’ comedy. May be because the scene didn’t evoke that much curiosity to know what she really would have meant. It’s not that I’m not a fan of unexplained scenes. I love the scene in ‘letter’ scene in Babel. That was a top-notch scene but here I didn’t even care. I was like, “there were so many things that we don’t know in the movie, lets add this as one more”