'ARRIVAL' REVIEW.......ALIEN-ATED AMY'S CLOSE ENCOUNTER....WE SQUID YOU NOT...

Arrival (2016)  is that rarest of birds.....a thoughtful, meditative sci-fi epic that's landed on earth to tweak you mind and not just your eyes and ears.

             Not that there isn't plenty to see......director Denis Villenueve knows how to fill up the screen with arresting images that recall both '2001' and 'Close Encounters'.  But in depicting a world gone agog at the sight of twelve ominous alien craft parking themselves into hovering positions around the globe, he uses astonishingly subtle visual restraint.

              Instead of viewing all this through a fully hysterical CNN Breaking News howl, we watch this cataclysmic event through the sad, watchful, wary eyes of a linguistics professor (Amy Adams). She can barely comprehend the spreading public anxiety around her, since she still silently broods and torments herself with haunting remembrances of her late daughter, who succumbed to cancer in her teens. ( A simple bender bender in the University parking lot brilliantly illustrates the panic far better than any scenes of fleeing humanity.)

               Adams is called upon to by the military to use her language skills to communicate with the aliens in one of the crafts floating over a Montana field. In the USA, as elsewhere in the world, anxious scientists and armed forces with increasingly itchy trigger fingers surround each alien ship.........with China rapidly preparing to go all 'Independence Day' on some alien ass.

                In their ships, the visitors, large, tentacle'd, squid-like things, float around in their own aquarium, spitting out globs of inky goo that arrange into circular symbols. The pensive methodical Adams eventually reaches the heart of the alien language.......and in altering her reality forever, the aliens reach her as well.  (We'll go no further than this, since this involves a stunning twist designed to leave you with your mouth wide open.....)

                 We normally despise movies that require a Master's degree in quantum physics to understand the mind-bending science involved, but "Arrival", bless its heart, isn't one of those. It's out to touch your heart, not confound your mind......and the film's moving conclusion might make you stop, think,  ponder, and even start a spirited argument on the moral choices involved. (With most current sci-fi movies, our only immediate pondering involves how soon we can reach the bathroom when the credits roll.....)

                  After a lifetime of fearfully watching the skies in alien-invasion movies, BQ wipes its brow with relief at this new crop of otherworldly visitors.....and give 4 full Tentacles (****) to this close encounter of the better kind......