I’m kicking off this month’s challenge with a wonderful movie that is now almost ten years old, but had a lot of things that signaled what was to come from director Denis Villenueve, and that is his film Arrival.
Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already to get the full posts or show your support by buying me a movie ticket.
If you haven’t seen it, Arrival is an incredible feat of science fiction filmmaking, set in an imagined real world where Earth is visited by 12 alien craft. They are 1500 foot tall black oblong shapes, that hover a few meters above the ground in various places around the world, seemingly inert, but enough to cause mass hysteria. Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguistics professor is called in by the military to try her hand at communicating with the alien beings and works with Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) along with members of the military and scientific communities around the world to understand just why the alien beings arrived on Earth.
Now, all of the movies I’m picking for the challenge this month are ones I’ve seen before. That’s part of my approach to it this time around, revisiting movies that I haven’t seen in a while that I want to take a second (or third, or more) look at. Arrival is a film that I didn’t see in theaters the first time around, but caught on DVD back in 2018. I remember being completely enthralled by it. The story is one that unfolds organically as you realize that it’s not really about these alien creature at all, but about humanity itself.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Oscar Project to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.