Arrival

Arrival (Villeneuve 2016) is an important film in a post-election day America. It is a think piece, not easily digestible like The Martian (Scott 2015) or a big, splashy CGI extravaganza like Avatar (Cameron 2009 — 2 hours and 42 minutes I would have rather spent in the dentist's chair). Though it employs all a screenwriter's tricks to keep you informed — flashbacks, diegetic news reports and voiceover, the facts are still relatively thin, the narrative at times, sluggish.

Like a lot of science fiction, the moral of the story lies in our view as a culture of 'the other'. But it goes further — Arrival explores how language (substitute 'media' here and you start to get the picture) changes the basis of our perception, and how those perceptions change from person to person. Marshall McLuhan said it best: the medium is the message. Something particularly poignant at this time in our country, when talking to each other, not at each other, has never been more important. The cast is solid and Amy Adams is as always, luminescent — not unlike Jodie Foster's Dr. Arroway in Contact (Zemeckis 1997). So, if you are willing to be patient, and observant, and put your thinking caps on, then there is a lot to be gleaned here.