50 Essential Sci-Fi Films of the 21st Century (So Far)

25. Arrival (2016)

Denis Villeneuve’s career cannot be neatly subdivided, as the director has progressed from feature to feature, gathering up elements along the way, like larger budgets and more well-known casts, while blending the kind of dramatic elements he used in the likes of Polytechnique and Incendies with the action and setpieces of his later films.

But in terms of this gradient, Villeneuve's first proper science fiction feature, Arrival, does offer something of a midpoint, sitting at an intersection in his career where he was going big but still keeping things personal, courting the genre crowd and the Academy in equal measure.

Arrival sees fleets of gigantic, black, concave, alien ships descend from the skies and hover menacingly above Earth. Rather than going instant nuke, the US Army calls in linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to try and defuse the situation by discovering how to communicate with the aliens.

It looks like a blockbuster, but plays out like an indie flick, taking place primarily in a single location and focusing on language and interpretation rather than action and warfare. And its occasionally slower pace and focus on the intricacies of the science of language are what make it so worthwhile, giving pretty much every other alien invasion movie a serious run for its money.