Brainy Arrival surprises with powerful pro-life message

Arrival director Denis Villeneuve hasn’t indicated he intended his new film to deliver one of the most beautiful pro-life moments in cinematic history. Yet the cerebral film, centered around the challenge of communicating with a mysterious alien life form, overpowers would-be rationales for abortion and assisted suicide.

When 12 gigantic oblong alien craft appear around the globe, a special U.S. military team headed by Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker) presses linguistics expert Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) into service at a Montana landing site. Weber demands to know: What do the aliens want? Where are they from? Why are they here?

Immediately feeling in over her head, Louise cautions Weber that her proficiency in Farsi won’t necessarily translate into an ability to make sense of extraterrestrial utterances. Adams gives a smart performance as a bookish loner thrust into military boys’ company.

The aliens permit Louise and Ian to enter the “shell”—as the soldiers term the spacecraft—where something like a large glass wall separates them. Louise tries communicating through simple oral and written words. In response, the “heptapods” emit low hums and blasts of dark vapor that condense into hula hoop-sized outlines with varying swirls and flourishes. Ian’s computer analysis of the aliens’ gaseous speech offers some clues. But Louise’s increasing understanding seems to correlate to stages of her late daughter’s life from birth until the day she died of cancer as a teen.

For a while, Arrival, adapted from Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life, plods forward like a graduate school lecture. But the initial fruitless exchanges should be appreciated for their realism. Sci-fi fans not addicted to Independence Day-style extravagance will relish Louise’s explanations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and nonlinear orthography. Quite abruptly, though, the methodical back-and-forth skips forward a month to a point where Louise is successfully translating using her iPad. To stay at two hours, the film obviously has to cut some corners, but the jump feels awkward.

Time is running out. The Chinese and Russian militaries are particularly antsy to batter the aliens with naval and ground artillery, and the Americans are losing patience, as well. Nations stop cooperating, potentially spelling disaster for the planet. Here, the film preaches the fashionable homily that sharing data beats hoarding resources.

But that message seems secondary.

The quiet, somber film (rated PG-13 for brief strong language) meticulously pieces together Louise’s stories to affirm life in a joyous moment that brought me to tears.