Tongue twister

Arrival is a big budget sci-fi film with a smaller, more pensive, cleverer film trying to get out, which has to be an improvement on a dumb film with an even dumber film trying to get out, as in the manner of Interstellar, say. So we have that to be thankful for, at least.

The film stars Amy Adams, who appears to be everywhere these days. (Check your sock drawer and under the bed; you never know.) She plays Dr Louise Banks, a university linguist who lives in a beautiful, modernist lakeside house, as any academic in any American film always does. (Do such houses come with tenure?) As we see right at the start, she is mourning the death of her daughter. You are not meant to understand how this figures until the ‘twist’ in the film’s final moment, which has been much applauded by other critics, although I have to say I saw it coming a mile off, if not ten miles off. Not bigging myself up here. Simply a plain fact.

But the main action in Arrival starts when alien pods …you know …arrive. These pods, which look like ginormous pumice stones hovering just above the ground, are eerily and richly realised, and have taken up residence at 12 sites across the globe. World governments are perturbed, naturally, and Louise is visited by a colonel from the US military (Forest Whitaker) who plays her a recording of the alien’s growly, echoey sounds, like tummy rumbles amplified. He wants to know: do we think they missed lunch? Shall we offer them a baguette from Pret? I’m toying with you. He wants to know: could Louise learn this language? And determine what the aliens’ purpose on earth might be.