20 Best Sci-Fi Films Of The 21st Century
3. Arrival
Denis Villeneuve is possibly the best sci-fi director going currently - there's a reason he's directing Dune, after all. Hence his second entry on this list.
Arrival is a beautiful film, but it's also a very smart and very self-aware one. One of the best elements of Arrival is the fact that it questions all of our assumptions regarding extraterrestrial beings. Generally in fiction, we arrogantly assume that aliens will simply do everything the way we do, maybe just slightly strangely by comparison. In reality, we may be entirely incapable of comprehending their ways. Arrival chooses instead to portray everything from the creatures' language to even their perception of time as being completely...well, alien.
The story itself is beautiful, but profoundly sad and asks difficult existential questions of its viewer. Arrival's story takes an awful lot of narrative beats from sci-fi classics, in particular Rendezvous with Rama. Unlike Rendezvous, however, the central mystery is resolved - not to suggest that we get a clean cut resolution, quite the contrary. Also, unlike Rendezvous, Arrival is far more concerned with the emotional side of first contact rather than solely the science behind it. Arrival is a gorgeous piece of cinema that you deserve to see.