Universal Language

Year: 2016

Director: Denis Villenueve

Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker 

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I don’t even know how Denis Villenueve found time to direct Arrival, between Sicario and his commitment to Blade Runner 2049. In the context of his career, it feels like a bonus film. Honestly, that’s also kind of how it feels in the sci-fi genre, too. It’s an intelligent, easy to like film that will completely alienate general audiences. But while it’s a terrific one-time watch, I don’t feel the need to ever revisit it. So, a bonus. A brief, ephemeral respite from this year’s cavalcade of horrors.

For our troubles, 2017 owes us the f**king best movie year since the form was invented.

In Arrival, 12 massive alien pods descend form the sky and hover over scattered regions of the Earth. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is conscripted by the U.S. military to learn the aliens’ language and figure out why they’re here, as the rest of the world panics. Together, she and scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) attempt to reign in the military’s itchy trigger fingers while finding a way to connect with a life form and culture they know literally nothing about.

Like teen movie directors, only sci-fi-ier.

Arrival is a spectacularly dry sci-fi film. It’s more mood piece than actioner, which is what I was anticipating, but it even defied my expectations by being less of a linguistic procedural and more a polemic against our current state of international affairs. And that’s fine, but it devolves into a bit of sci-fi mysticism that could have been meaningful, but mostly smoothes over plot holes and teaches a lesson that seems like should be attached to some other movie.

This is another one of those films that, like Moonlight, are more fun to dissect than sit through. Its shades of Slaughterhouse-Five are intellectually stimulating, but they lack the wit and verve of Vonnegut’s masterpiece. In fact, most of its attempts to wring any sort of emotion from the audience fall flat, from the Up-esque opening that attempts to make us weep for a character we’ve never been properly introduced to, to the vague kinship between Renner and Adams that has the chemistry of a second grade science set.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re both fine actors and they do a great job (especially Adams, who holds the entire thing together and lands some comic relief that just shouldn’t work), but these two characters aren’t human beings. They’re science-spouting automatons, mere conduits for the larger themes of Arrival. There’s next to no human connection between them, and any time a scene hinges on that it misses the mark. Arrival is too cold for that.

The only heartwarming going on here is the result of alien experiments.

Other than that, though, Arrival is a pretty great movie. A chilly human element is totally fine when you’re presenting such sci-fi marvels as the gravity-defying entryway to the alien pod, a simple but stunning piece of design that never fails to wow. And while the design of the aliens themselves is intentionally obscured for the most part, the appearance of their written language is a stunning bit of truly inhuman creation that emphasizes the massive challenge our heroes are facing.

Arrival is a monument to genre aesthetic, highlighting the alien in everyday life Villenueve’s direction is slick and stylish, making frequently bizarre choices that feel organic yet extremely odd at the same time. One shot in particular, a silhouette that makes Dr. Banks’ profile look like one of the mythical Greys of alien lore, is just plain marvelous, visually underscoring the film’s themes.

You wouldn’t think that visual metaphor should be a marvel in the cinematic medium, but you haven’t seen as many slasher films as I have.

It’s a good thing the good stuff here is great, because there’s actually a lot of sneaky little elements that kinda suck. We’ve already covered the useless human element, but there’s also a bizarre scene jammed sideways into the middle of the movie, in which Jeremy Renner narrates a montage (despite the fact that his character is nowhere near important enough to break the fourth wall like that), skipping over months of plot that would have actually been very interesting in a bizarre clip show that feels like a commercial for some sort of alien liberal arts university. This scene is never mentioned or replicated again, which is for the best.

Then there’s Jóhan Jóhansson’s score, which is mostly adequate but occasionally slips into twee a cappella that feels like a direct lift from Swiss Army Man. That score was terrific, but it fits with the tone of Arrival like a rusty knife. But, hey. I found it interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Sometimes a movie exists just for aesthetic reasons and sometimes that’s good enough.

TL;DR: Arrival is an aesthetically and intellectually pleasing sci-fi movie, but it's still an ephemeral lark.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 832

South Of The Border

Happy Halloween! This may not have been the treat you were expecting from a horror blog, but despite my postponed horror ambitions, I had to get something out for you guys. I love you all. Have a spooky day!

Year: 2015

Director: Dennis Villeneuve

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro

Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute

MPAA Rating: R

When Sergio took me to see Sicario, he said it was this year’s Gone Girl (in that it took him by surprise and earned his #1 slot for the year). He had no idea how right he was. Sicario is this year’s Gone Girl, because it has received unanimous adulation from critics and audiences alike, yet – while I recognize its skill and quality – I personally can’t seem to get purchase on it.

Though my bladder survived Sicario, so it already comes off better in my esteem.

Here’s the sitch: Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is a by-the-book FBI operative fighting the war on drugs. After a mission that succeeded in its goals but ended in tragedy, she is asked to join a special task force helmed by the too-casual Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). She agrees out of a sense of duty and a personal drive to end drug trafficking from across the Mexican border, but when she discovers that one of the team members is Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), a grizzled former prosecutor for a Colombian cartel, she’s not so sure.

She quickly discovers that the team’s methods are more than a little shady, involving illicit border crossing, public shootouts, and plain old torture. Thus begins her journey of being righteously indignant while watching bad things happen around her and eventually to her. Does she change? Sort of.

Does she bang Jon Bernthal? I wish.

While Sicario’s political agenda is clear, I can’t help but feel as if I’m bing kept at arm’s distance from the characters. Yes, it exposes the realities of when bad people do bad things to one another and good people get caught in the middle. The film shines when it depicts loss of innocence, on either side of the border. But the questions the film really wants us to ask just aren’t present beneath the boilerplate Badass with a Vendetta material.

It just feels like an action picture with a slightly elevated scope of geopolitical context, which is totally fine. Benicio del Toro successfully portrays a man emptied out by crimes of greed and vice, but as a character he functions more like The Shape from Halloween – an archetypical figure of pure symbolic force. There’s not exactly an opening to climb on into his psyche. And Emily Blunt (who, by the way, between this and Edge of Tomorrow, needs to star in every action flick from now on) skillfully portrays the heartbreak of a woman who has always played it safe discovering how dangerous the world can be. But she too is a cypher, and as skilled a Blunt is, she can’t break through the flatness of the page to construct a character who is genuinely worth caring about beyond her natural charisma.

But you know what genre works perfectly with flat, overfamiliar characters? Action! Sicario’s intense sequences might not all be guns-a-blazing high octane material, but they’re brutal and real, refusing to allow the catharsis of film violence and shoving your face right in the muck. The film opens on one such scene, and they never do lose their impact even as they get pared down to more intimate levels as the plot progresses.

Think of it as a reverse Mad Max.

Although many elements aren’t quite there for me personally, the one pristine banner I can stand behind is the cinematography. A climactic sequence is captured with real thermal and night vision cameras, alternating seamlessly between traditional and guerrilla shooting techniques to create an expansive visual universe that underscores the gritty realism of the plot. Sicario is also populated with cold, detached aerial shots that glide across city and desert alike as though it were John Carpenter’s barren tundra from The Thing.

You know what? I think Sicario is just trying to be a John Carpenter movie. Deliberate pacing, a buried political agenda, stunning yet chilly camerawork…

All it’s missing is the sense of fun.

Sicario is an intriguing piece, that’s for certain. It attempts to a – and clearly does – reach an audience with a harrowing emotional journey, yet the characters it puts through its paces are clean Etch-a-Sketches, ready to be twirled according to the personality and political temperament of whoever happens to be watching. It’s a beautiful vase, a sleek but empty vessel ready to be filled with your own thoughts and feelings. There ain’t nothing wrong with that. I just feel like that prevents certain Brennans from wholly accessing the film.

Check it out if you’re so inclined and/or want a very good reason never to do drugs. It’s like an anti-tourism commercial for Juarez. Directed by John Carpenter.

TL;DR: Sicario is a slick but empty action thriller with a massive political agenda.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 848
Reviews In This Series
Sicario (Villenueve, 2015)
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sollima, 2018)