Check out his deviant art page, he has some great works. I chose this poster because it is FAR better than the actual posters.
ARRIVAL: A review
Arrival is a 2016 Sci-fi film directed by the always fantastic Denis Villeneuve and stars Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a talented linguist, and Jeremy Renner as Ian Donnelly, a physicist. The film also stars Forest Whitaker as Colonel Weber.
With a modest budget of 47 million, Arrival managed to take in 203 million worldwide.
I had gone in to Arrival relatively late and completely blind. Besides seeing the Rotten Tomatoes score, I hadn't watched any trailers or read any reviews. I completely recommend this, although some people argue that seeing the Rotten Tomatoes score may skewer your opinion. It was another movie I had stumbled upon while browsing Amazon Prime and I'm glad I watched it. I grew up watching Science Fiction and its easily one of my favorite genres. I expected a cliche alien invasion story, or a misunderstanding story that causes the aliens to leave us all alone. I should have expected more Mr. Villeneuve, and I can see why people are calling him the future of Science Fiction. Now lets jump into this review.
THE PLOT:
After 12 alien ships come to Earth, the U.S. Army has employed Louise Banks to decipher their complex language. But the clock is ticking as other nations are growing distrustful of the UFOs.
THE CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Normally I go into my overall thoughts first, but I really wanted to talk about the cinematography first. Arrival is a beautifully shot movie. It creates a sense of tension when it wants to, a sense of wonder when it needs to, and sense of relief when it is earned. One of my favorite shots of the movie actually comes pretty early. The crew comes aboard the alien ship, and the camera shows they are upside down when they walk into the peace talks room. It doesn't do anything to advance the plot, but its great little touches like these that just make the movie entertaining to watch from a visual standpoint. Its also a very dark movie, and I mean that literally. Scenes are always in dark rooms and even when they're outside there's hardly ever any sunlight. You actually never even see the sun until the end of the movie, with it always being blocked out by clouds.
THE LEADING LADY:
Amy Adams is easily my favorite part of this movie. Initially, I hadn't seen her in anything outside of "The Office" as a handbag saleswoman and Jim's ex-girlfriend and Lois Lane in the DCEU. She knocks it out of the park with her performance. I felt her pain, I felt her joy, I felt her despair. She outshines other heavyweights like Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker with ease. I thought it was great how she drew upon teaching her child to read to help teach the aliens.
After watching the movie, I went to her Wikipedia page and saw that she was nominated for 5(!) Academy Awards (unfortunately not this one), so I'll definitely have to keep an eye out for anything else she's in.
OVERALL THOUGHTS:
If you can't tell, I really enjoyed this movie. I really don't have many complaints, except for maybe the plot could be too complex for general audiences. I also found that the movie's soundtrack was fairly underwhelming and relied on Inception-like BWONGS a little too much. I can't recall any of the OST in the movie. I will partially blame being too engrossed in the movie to care.
The strongest point of the movie is a toss-up between the directing and the writing. The writing realllly made me feel for Amy Adam's character. Villeneuve also showed what it might be like to make first contact, and the struggles with communication and mistrust.
I'd like to point out that this movie had HALF the budget of Bright and looked twice as nice. This is how you do CGI. This is how you do world building.
FINAL SCORE: A
Arrival is not only a great Sci-Fi movie, but a great movie in general. Its a shame it didn't do as well as it should have in theaters.
STRAY THOUGHTS (SPOILERS!):
- Some people really suck man
- Imperfect translations CAN cause a big problem
- How do they expect the aliens to communicate if we don't learn each others languages Colonel Weber?
- When Renner takes off his suit, all I could hear him say was "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die comfortable"
- I took the cloudy skies to represent a cloudy future. Once she saved the day, the sun came out and everything would be alright.
- The Whitaker line "They Arrive" was so cheesy and out of place. They were already there!
- The aliens look like Reapers from the Mass Effect series
Comments
Post a Comment