Hold on to your seats and fasten your seatbelts. This extraordinary, original sci-fi mellow-dramatic sitcom not only overturns expectations in brilliant ways, but it also delves on deeply felt themes of life, loss, and love. In other words, you're dead if you haven't seen this. Here's the part where hoodlums wave their guns and people run down the streets, shrieking for their lives, right? Ha ha ha
The Aliens Have Landed On Earth
Amy Adams shine as Dr. Louise Banks, a divorced philology professor in grieving over the recent death of her 12-year-old daughter, Hannah. She walks around in a remorseful fog - until the day 12 egg-shaped vehicles drop down at random locations around the world with zero interpretation. Louise is drafted by a colonel (Forest Whitaker) to travel to the prairie lands of Montana, site of the closest unit, to try to coincide with two of the E.T.s. On her team: a theoretical physicist named Ian (Jeremy Renner).
The aliens, by the way, aren't scary Martians with big heads blowing up buildings with blue light lasers. They kind of look alike a massive, majestic octopus. When the two "heptapods" emerge from the spaceship, they raise their tentacles and emit black Rorschach-like flecks behind a protective glass barrier. The visual is striking yet intentionally unsettling: By nature, we're all postulated to be frightened of these beasts.
Louise is fascinated and at awe. In learning, what these invaders reasons are for the invasion, she doesn't want to be hurried, and in a clever scene, she breaks down just the lengths she must go to just to gain their trust. She can't just ask them directly, "Why are you here?" in English and expect them to understand her, let it be answered. Open contact is the key issue here, she explains to authorities, and aliens require it just as much as humans.
This is one of many considerate touches in the scenario that refuses to stoop onto the audience. Yet in time, Louise and Ian develop an understanding with the two aliens, whom they dub as Abbott and Costello. (Ian's idea. In a rare case of wit, he also has a decent theory about how '80s singer Sheena Easton figures into the heptapods' M.O.)
While Louise crack down the codes, she unlocks memories about herself and Hannah. As they arrived in flashing fragments, and she can't quite wrap her brain around some of them. Surely, there must be some sort of a connection between the remembrance and the aliens, but it's the one thing Louise can't quite decode just yet. Adams' reflective achievements helps solve the mystery. Alas, it's probably too subdued to nab an Oscar nomination.
From The Martian to Interstellar to Prometheus, many sci-fi pics in recent years have essayed to add a personal flourish to an intergalactic, powerful special effects-driven spectacle. It's not enough for a hero to complete a mission; he (or she) must also run the aegis of emotional uproar. None of the projects have could pull it off with confidence - not even the wonderful Gravity, which traveled into treacly mawkishness when Sandra Bullock's character mourned her own deceased child. This movie is the only one to reach for the stars and succeed at that.
