Arrival

An intellectual science-fiction film with a title that contains a double meaning, about a linguistics expert brought in by the US military to initiate first contact communication. On the TV series Babylon 5, the Earth-Minbari War was due to miscommunication when the Minbari ship opened its bay doors leaving their weapons exposed. Meant as a show of respect, it was misinterpreted as a hostile act. Based on the story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, 12 saucer shaped objects appear around the globe, silent, with each country desperately trying to decipher the intent of the occupants known as Heptapods, octopus-like creatures right out of a 1950s pulp novel. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and her physicist partner played by Jeremy Renner engage in a lengthy “Me, Tarzan-You, Jane” interpretive display with chemical ink hieroglyphs to discover if the aliens are asking for help or offering theirs. The trouble is that the human species has difficulty communicating with each other, much less sharing interspecies annotations.  As an inside joke, the two Heptapods who landed in Montana are nicknamed “Abbott & Costello” as in Abbott & Costello Meet The….!

[PG-13]