15 Greatest Hard Science Fiction Movies Of All Time
4. Arrival
Only a handful of mainstream directors working in Hollywood today have the ability to produce films which manage to transcend their commercial ambitions and yet somehow retain popular appeal. Denis Villeneuve is one such director, bringing a degree of class and thoughtfulness to blockbuster scale productions rare for the industry.
Arrival, released in 2016 and seen as something of a warm up for his later sequel to Blade Runner, is one such film, tackling relatively complex scientific and philosophical themes within the framework of a multiplex movie and succeeding immensely.
It's an alien invasion movie along the lines of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, in which linguistics plays a central role - both in how humans strive to communicate with their visitors and how language and memory shape the human experience.
Villeneuve consulted linguistics experts from McGill University to craft the alien language, while Amy Adams constitutes the emotional core of the film, her sophisticated character of a language expert trying to decode the alien language before the military take control anchoring Arrival to the world of feelings familiar to the audience.