Like last year’s Room, the alien-invasion (sort of) movie Arrival is an emotional gut-punch, a fist swinging right into the most vulnerable spot in the parental solar plexus. Unlike Room, whose wallop was obvious from its mother-and-child-imprisoned premise, Arrival hits you in a way that is hard to explain. Indeed, I can’t explain much of anything about what makes it, maybe, a great movie, because almost all of its considerable power lies in the shock of revelation.
I can tell you about the aliens, at least. They arrive in a dozen ships, huge gray lozenges hanging perpendicular to land and sea in twelve locations around the world — China and Montana, Sierra Leone and Sudan — with no clear rhyme or reason to their placement. A hatch opens and we are invited inside, into a large space with gravity and atmosphere set to our specifications, facing a huge glassy barrier behind which the aliens appear to us, fog-shrouded and mysterious. They look part elephant, part octopus, with dark gray skin and seven appendages — “heptapods,” we label them — and a body that vanishes upward into the mist. And they clearly mean to speak to us, in strange vibratory voices. We just have no idea what they’re saying.
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