Our heroine is Louise (Amy Adams in what has got to be one of her best roles), a linguist who teaches at a college and lives alone in a glass house overlooking a lake. We learn about her daughter, a smart young girl who died of cancer at a young age. It's a heartbreaking opening to the film, a set up to a story that has more emotion than the sci-fi genre would have you believe. Suddenly, large orbs appear all over the world. It makes the news and interrupts the class with a barrage of phone calls and texts. No one can verify them as man-made, and the locations around the planet seem strategic. This is indeed first contact. People are glued to the TV and buildings are evacuated. I wonder what would happen if aliens ever were to touch down on earth. I would assume this is as accurate as I would imagine.
Louise is contacted almost immediately by a Colonel (Forest Whitaker), who confirms contact has been made with the alien beings, and yet no promising communication can be made. He asks her to decipher an audio clip that sounds as much like a language as a whale's call. It's impossible. Louise confirms that the only way to actually learn would be to have a face-to-face encounter; to teach them the rudimentary words and go from there... You start with the word for "human" and end with the answer to the complex question "what are your intentions here on earth?"
The spaceship is one of the many striking aspects of the film, first revealed in a grand shot in the wilderness of Montana. Fog spills over green hills, and there on the horizon is a black mass 1,000 feet in the air, hovering just above the ground. A military base is set up nearby, and work is quickly underway. The entrance to the ship is a 10-foot hole that opens at the base every 18 hours. A cherry picker raises the crew inside the chasm, and a change in gravity allows them to literally walk up the walls to a meeting chamber. I wonder how they first made this discovery, or who was the first to agree to venture inside the menacing ship.
There is a twist of sorts at the climax of the film that leaves you reeling over the images and moments leading up to it. It still has me scratching my head by the complexity of it, and left me somber at it's implications. This is a deus ex machina to end all deus ex machinas, and yet I was moved by the way it worked out (rather than feeling cheated). The climax ends in a way that could only happen through specific series of events, and if you think too hard about what is happening you will only hurt yourself. How badly I want to ask you questions about the movie, the ending, the aliens (10-foot tall beings that look like upright squid), and the expansive questions of fate and choice. This is a brilliant movie directed by Denis Villeneuve (he made one of the decade's best movies last year with 'Sicario') and the talent displayed is bar-none some of the best filmmaking around right now. The score by Jóhann Jóhannsson is surely an Oscar-contender for it's ease in slipping back and forth between sounds of horror and orchestral moments of harmony. For a film this complex, giving a concise review is hard. It's better to just advise you to see this movie as soon as possible, and perhaps plan ahead to see it twice.
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