Denis Villeneuve has proven himself as one of the great modern directors after movies like "Prisoners" along with this movie and others of his that I'm just flat out dying to see like "Sicario" and "Blade Runner: 2049" and on top of that this movie is one of 2016's very best. This is no ordinary movie about aliens where we learn to love them and want to be their friends such as in Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T." have shown us or a movie that makes us want to be scared to death of them like "Alien" or "Aliens" , but it is a movie that makes us uncertain and curious as to what they want to do to us and why they're here on Earth in the first place. The movie stars Amy Adams in a top notch performance that was unfortunately robbed of an Oscar nomination as Louise Banks a linguistics professor who along with the rest of the world learns that 12 mysterious alien ships have touched down on 12 different locations around the globe and is recruited by an Army Colonel (Forest Whitaker) to find out what their purpose is on this planet mainly because she has a top secret security clearance. She then is taken into a helicopter to go to the site where they will find the alien ship and on her team is a man named Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) who she develops a close relationship with on the mission. During the first scenes in the movie while I was waiting for the aliens to appear I felt the same feeling I had waiting for the shark in "Jaws" but only this movie isn't as suspenseful. Villeneuve is a director who really knows what he is doing behind the camera and really knows how to get strong performances from his actors whether it's Hugh Jackman in "Prisoners" or Amy Adams in this movie. The movie is one of the very best science fiction movies I have ever seen along with "Inception", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "ET", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "the "Star Wars" films and more. This is a movie that will stand the test of time over the next several decades and is truly a masterpiece.
Review of Arrival
