Arrival

Saw Arrival, a scifi film wherein a dozen gigantic oval ships appear all over the earth much to the surprise of everyone. At given intervals, the ships open up and humans can climb in and try to communicate with the giant, octopus-like aliens within. we start in medias res, following the protagonist who is a linguistics professor. She is a withdrawn sort of woman who continues to teach class even after her students stop attending and who is recruited after a Giotto's circle-style definition of a Sanskrit word. Despite its flashy premise, this is a philosophical sort of scifi. More The Lake House than Independence Day.

The film is good and exciting in its slow unfolding of communication with the aliens. The establishment of a means of communication with the aliens is itself fascinating enough. The film's larger preoccupation however is with predestination and free will. This is introduced via the aliens' perception of time and feels sort of tacked on. These concerns become vital to the plot later on, but the aliens feel like an end in and of themselves. Mixing in lofty ideas like this seems like a literary device which doesn't translate well to the screen. There's also a Rush Limbaugh-like youtube personality that shows up in one place which felt very jarring. A strange moment of reality intruding into this space of green fields, and fog, and eerie aliens trying to communicate with us.

The film has the typical lo-fi aesthetic of modern sci fi. There's lots of lush nature and strange, plastic, military hardware hanging about. The effect is one of slightly haphazard strictness. We all have to be disinfected after going into the alien chambers, but we can also just walk over to the ship if we want to. It's funny to go back and look at scifi films from the 50s and 60s. Everyone is so competent. I guess the space race had impressed folks sufficiently that they believed it was possible to run an organization without mistakes. Modern sci fi is much more ramshackle.

Anyway, Arrival was good, but I kind of felt bored by it. It might have been more straightforward if it had focused on the aliens less. As is, it feels like a philosophical sci fi from the 70s mashed up with a blockbuster sort of film from the 80s. Uncomfortable.