Denis Villeneuve's Sci-Fi Drama 'Arrival' Is All About Amy Adams, Aliens And Linguistics

When mysterious spacecrafts touch down across the globe, an elite team – lead by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) – is brought together to investigate.

By Mohammed HidhayatPublished 6 years ago • 2 min read

While the world awaits Denis Villeneuve's grim, smoggy futuristic version of dystopian Los Angeles in Blade Runner 2, the director made plans to accommodate another science fiction movie and now we've a 2-minute long trailer. It stars Amy Adams which is all I want to know. The teaser previously released sometime last week gave our first look at the characters played by Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker. The trailer reminds us why the word 'thriller' is synonymous with the works of Dennis Villeneuve.

Here's a blurb if you still haven't heard about this movie

"....... When mysterious spacecrafts touch down across the globe, an elite team – lead by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) – is brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers – and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity."

The movie, previously called 'Story of Your Life', is based on a brilliant short science fiction parable of the same name. Written by Ted Chiang, it won the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novella and was nominated for the 1999 Hugo Award for best novella.

Arrival arriving this november....probably

Dr. Louise Banks played by Amy Adams is a highly commendable linguist ordered by the U.S military to try and find a way to communicate with the extra-terrestrial guests who have arrived in a large pod, a form of UFO aka 'The Shell' (while other 11 pods keep arriving) and settled on a luxurious spread of prairie away from the hustle-bustle of mega scrapers and city mongers.

Jeremy Renner as physicist Ian Donnelly works with Banks to help deconstruct the alien syntax from a mathematical POV while The Last King of Scotland Forest Whitaker puts on his military suit for the role of a Colonel Weber.

As the trailer patiently saunters, Amy Adams works hard to decode alien calligraphy, succeeds and that's where it kicks in. The movie will be about the central character Dr. Louise Banks' personal transformation in the course of learning an alien language, her emotional process in understanding life from birth to death and beyond. While the World is reeling under mass hysteria and Countries of Earth are turned against each other, only she can uncover if the aliens are here to help Mankind.

Major points from the book :

The alien species are radially symmetrical
They initiate contact
They have two distinct language forms - a spoken and a written language
The original story has two plots - Banks' attempt to communicate with aliens and an anecdotal look into her daughter’s life at various different ages
What would it be like to go through life knowing what would happen in the future, but being unable to change it?
The alien concept of time-space continuum is completely different from our own

I've come to an understanding that the screenplay solely focus on linguistics. But I'm excited for it. I sure believe you feel the same. One thing's for sure - Denis Villeneuve is on a role. A tight cerebral sci-fi drama about determinism, language, and Sapir–Whorf hypothesis will unfold on November 11, 2016. And then, we wait for Blade Runner 2.

Here are 12 beautiful posters pinpointing the locations encamped by the pods. You can check out the latitudes and longitudes printed in the bottom right corner.