![]() ![]() ![]() But the mere fact of their existence turns the characters’ world on its side. The heptapods arrive without warning and without explanation they seem to have no agenda they're able to express, or that we understand. ![]() Louise's memories of her daughter appear just as inexplicably, rupturing the movie's equally grey surface at moments that surprise even her. (No spoiler complaints, please: we find out in the first few minutes.) The creatures, dubbed heptapods because of their seven appendages, appear one day in grey, oblong ships that look like massive pebbles, hovering improbably above a field in Montana and elsewhere around the world – 12 ships in all, the apostles to a messiah who may never arrive. ![]() The story of a talented linguist asked to decipher the creatures' low, nearly subsonic rumblings is also the story of Louise Banks (Amy Adams) coming to terms with her daughter's death. All it took was an alien species' appearance on Earth. But with Arrival, Villeneuve finally finds a subject, and a script, whose magnitude matches the weight he assigns to it. His last films, Prisoners and Sicario, were logy with self-importance peel back their trumped-up moral quandaries and they verge on well-accomplished fraud. Denis Villeneuve specialises in films with grand themes and hollow centres, a builder of splendid edifices in which nobody is home. ![]()
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