I must qualify that Frank Herbert’s feudal sci-fi story had a huge influence on my life, including an upcoming project I am developing. I have read no book more frequently than I have read Dune.
Thus, I had great anxiety about Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation as I entered the theatre. Within the first two minutes, that anxiety was replaced with exhilaration as this 57-year-old man once again felt the upwelling of emotions that he experienced as a 13-year-old boy seeing Star Wars for the first time.
Villeneuve has done an amazing job staying faithful to the novel, including scenes that I had almost forgotten were in the book. But that also means that the movie is long and will require several installments to complete the saga.
At moments, some of the performances felt a little over-wrought, but as the movie progressed, the performances became more nuanced and subtle, as though the actors finally got into their roles & began to understand the characters more clearly. By the end, Timothee Chalamet was Paul Atreides. (I reserve any comments on Zendaya as Chani, as her role is still quite limited.)
But more than the performances, this is a movie of scale & spectacle. I nearly wept at the first worm sign, & I am confident my chin was on my chest when the first worm appeared. These worlds are real. Villeneuve & his team have done an amazing job bringing these planets & their inhabitants to life. And those alien places & family conflicts are given greater life with the soul-resonant score by Hans Zimmer.
For those who haven’t devoted their hearts to Frank Herbert’s ecological fever dream, Dune may not be all that. They may see it as slow & ponderous. They may consider the characters melodramatic & hyperbolic. They may consider tedious the need for multiple installments.
You do not need to know the novel to enjoy this film. The story plays out coherently without inside jokes or Easter eggs to the informed.
For people like me, however, people whose pulse matches the throbbing Zimmer score, whose lungs breathe the Spice melange, whose DNA is infused with Bene Gesserit mythos, Dune is our homecoming. We are the Fremen.
Although Star Wars will remain the apex of my formative years as a young writer and dreamer, Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays a close second. At the risk of blasphemy, the latter film was significantly superior to the Lucas’ space western, offering insights into humanity and our possible place in the Universe that I couldn’t begin to fathom until later in life.
Such films are rare.
Arrival, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and opened widely this week, is one of those films and is a worthy successor to Close Encounters.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer, a man better known for horror films like the reboots of The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Arrival opens with the arrival of 12 alien space craft—looking a bit like fat Pringles—at strategic positions around the globe.
Almost the entire story is told from the perspectives of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and shows their efforts to communicate with the aliens under the watchful eye of military commander Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), as scientists and military commands near the other 11 craft attempt the same.
While the trio works to simply comprehend the existence of the aliens, let alone try to communicate with them, the outside world falls apart as fear and a sense of insignificance grasps at the hearts of populations being told largely nothing, feeding the paranoid darkness that resides within all of us.
Without giving key aspects of the story away, the movie deals with broad metaphysical questions about existence and time, while at the same time, providing insights into our species at both its greatest apex and deepest nadir. And at its very base, it encapsulates the importance of trust in our evolution as individuals, as a society and as a species.
Amy Adams channels Richard Dreyfuss in her awe at the miracle before her
This is Amy Adams’ movie, and so all of these concepts are displayed through her fears and growth. She must learn to trust her human colleagues. She must learn to trust her alien counterparts, adorably nicknamed Abbott and Costello. And most importantly of all, she must learn to trust herself despite flashes of what seems like madness.
To tie back to Close Encounters, Adams is this movie’s Richard Dreyfuss, and she embues her character with both the same manic trepidation and child-like wonder as Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary.
Renner and Whitaker, for their parts, are incredibly subdued in this film.
Renner’s Donnelly is an emotional anchor for Adams. Coming from the academic world, his tone is at once familiar and playfully combative.
The photographic focus on Adams is representative of Renner’s role in this film.
Whitaker’s Weber is authoritative and yet unthreatening. He is the calm in the intellectual storm, grounding the two academics for what they are about to witness and becoming increasingly appreciative of the miracle that unfolds before him.
What I found particularly interesting about Heisserer’s story was that the antagonist of the film was Fear.
Fear of the unknown. Fear of mortality. Fear of our own insignificance. And more importantly, our deepest fear that as individuals, we simply don’t measure up.
And breaking the rules of screenwriting, this fear was not embodied in a single antagonist, but in all characters, and it was only in fleeting moments that any individual character acted upon his or her fear. And yet, as fleeting as those moments were, each was vital to the evolution of the story and the critical relationships to their next stages.
Connection relies on trust
Again, these moments fed back to the question of trust, particularly in the face of betrayal.
To assure everyone that this film isn’t simply a cerebral exercise—although it is beautiful in what it does accomplish—there is also a very deep emotional thread that runs through this movie, again centering on Adams. And from the opening, it seems like this personal journey is completely disconnected from the sci-fi plot.
But as the story unfolds and we begin to explore what is possible in an infinite cosmos, we begin to realize that the external and internal journeys are one and the same. There is no distinction. The line between physical and emotional is an artifact of our choices as humans and society.
Arrival continues the saga that started with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Will Arrival be to adolescent minds today what Close Encounters was to mine in 1977?
Probably not.
It is a much more adult film that its predecessor, with many fewer action sequences to engage the eye. And Villeneuve’s views and sensibilities are very different from Steven Spielberg’s.
But Arrival is the closest thing to those seminal films that we have seen in a generation or more. And for the more engaged child or adolescent, it will open a window to another plane of storytelling.
Mother, Nehiyaw, Metis, & Itisahwâkan - career communicator. This is my collection of opinions, stories, and the occasional rise to, or fall from, challenge. In other words, it's my party, I can fun if I want to. Artwork by aaronpaquette.net
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