The Sci-Fi Thriller On Netflix With The Most Realistic Alien Invasion
If aliens landed on our planet, how would we be able to communicate with them? That’s the big question the 2016 film Arrival tries to answer, while doing a surprisingly great job of showing what a real alien invasion would look like. The sci-fi drama is currently streaming on Netflix, and it’s absolutely worth a watch.
In Arrival, 12 mysterious alien spaceships land in 12 different locations around the world, all the way from Australia to Montana. Initially, it’s unclear what the alien beings want from our planet and whether or not they come in peace. Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor named Louise Banks who gets recruited by the government to try and communicate with extraterrestrial beings.
Arrival focuses on how humans and aliens would communicate, making it one of the smartest sci-fi movies on Netflix.
Throughout the film, tensions rise around the world as countries disagree on how to handle the invasion. Some people want to destroy all 12 of the spaceships, while others want to try and give the aliens a chance. As time ticks by, Amy Adams and her crew try to decipher the alien’s language to save them and everyone on Earth.
While some alien invasion movies like Independence Day, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and even Mars Attacks focus on the threat of extraterrestrials and how humans can fend them off, Arrival takes a different approach. The movie focuses on the importance of communication and how understanding another’s language can be the difference between life and death.
The idea for the film is based on the 1998 sci-fi novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. The story won the Nebula Award for Best Novella and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for its thought-provoking literature and unique take on an alien invasion. The author has shared that he enjoyed Arrival and felt that it was both a good movie and a good adaptation of his novella.
The plot is very intriguing, but the cast helps bring the story to life. In addition to Amy Adams, the sci-fi film also stars Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tzi Ma.
In 2017, Arrival won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation as well as the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.
The most important element of Arrival is the communication between the humans and the aliens, which they call heptapods due to their seven limbs. The extraterrestrials use a visual language that is made up of circular symbols and palindromic phrases, which Amy Adams’s character quickly learns to decipher.
Several real-life linguistics professors praised the film for its realistic approach to communicating with beings from another world. One professor from Queen Mary University of London appreciated the hypotheses, theories, and testing methods that were used, commenting that it was “spot on.” Another professor from McGill University felt that Arrival used the right approach for communication by starting out small and having lots of interactions with the aliens.
Behind the scenes, director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer actually created an entire language for the aliens. They put together a “logogram bible,” complete with over a hundred different visuals that the aliens could use to communicate. This helped ensure that the fictional language was as realistic as possible and made it that much more believable for audiences.
In addition to this, the scientist and tech innovator Stephen Wolfram and his son Christopher Wolfram served as consultants on the film to confirm that the terminology, graphics, and depictions were as accurate as possible.
When Arrival was released at the box office in November of 2016, it was hugely successful despite not being a holiday movie. With a budget of $47 million, it ended up grossing over $203 million worldwide. It was considered one of the best films of the year and made its way onto multiple year-end lists from varying film critics.
Real scientists and futurists were involved behind the scenes of Arrival, which is why it’s considered one of the most accurate alien movies.
In 2017, Arrival won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation as well as the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. It received several nominations at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography, but only won Best Sound Editing. For her outstanding performance, Amy Adams was nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globe Awards, the SAG Awards, the BAFTA Awards, and the Critic’s Choice Award, but did not win any of the awards.
Now that the government has confirmed that aliens exist, it’s only a matter of time until they try and communicate with us. We recommend watching Arrival on Netflix to help prepare for the eventual invasion.
