Denis Villeneuve
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Connections, in both directions
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Arrival (2016)
Plot Themes Music
What happens is more like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the Steven Spielberg classic in which communication is the key.
Instead, Villeneuve's film asserts its place among far more nuanced interplanetary explorations such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact and the more ponderous (and far less humanistic) Interstellar, as well as in a venerable tradition of cerebral literary sci-fi.
In the realm of big screen science fiction, "Arrival" feels like a mix of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with a generous dose of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Yes, it's not the first alien-landing film to do that (cue those five-notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind ).
There are elements of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in man's attempt to communicate with aliens (Jóhann Jóhannsson's ("Sicario") affecting score makes a subtle nod), "Gravity" in a skyward-looking grieving mother's bond to her child, and many films where global crisis causes conflict among nations, but "Arrival" is unique in its mind altering concept of communication and time travel.
Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Steven Spielberg's " Close Encounters of the Third Kind" dealt with similar themes in a much more simple, movie-friendly way.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Themes Visuals
In the realm of big screen science fiction, "Arrival" feels like a mix of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with a generous dose of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Once inside the ship, the gravity-defying sequence showing the pathway to the meeting room warrants the whisper of ‘cool’ under your breath while the whole alien craft itself feels like it’s made from the same eerie and out of this world material as the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Steven Spielberg's " Close Encounters of the Third Kind" dealt with similar themes in a much more simple, movie-friendly way.
Smooth and featureless, like a curvy version of the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (only way bigger), it is one of 12 floating, foreboding UFOs that have positioned themselves around the globe.
But even with the obvious homages to proggy sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the film has an emotional weight and kick.
Time has always been a great theme of science fiction, but increasingly the movies have emphasized grief as well, as evidenced by Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (which isn't sci-fi but has roots in the genre — it dares to pick up the gauntlet 2001: A Space Odyssey threw down decades before).
One review noted that Project Hail Mary tries to balance dark human emotion – in the vein of Arrival and Interstellar – alongside lighter, funnier moments, and those two tones don’t always gel smoothly.
Some of my own personal favorite hard sci-fi movies would be Moon, Arrival, Contact, and Ad Astra, along with the aforementioned The Martian, Sunshine, and Interstellar.
They (and Weir) are also a bit guilty of sacrificing feasibility for dramatic momentum (Arrival this ain’t).
Even “Arrival” (2016) had a storyline with people who were anti-alien and anti-collaboration.
Project Hail Mary doubles and triples down on the communication problems that have been genre staples from 2001 to Silent Running to Contact, Interstellar and Arrival.
We’ve all seen Arrival (2016), where linguistic barriers were more plausibly navigated over the entire movie’s runtime; here, a laptop is translating alien dialogue within days.
Mystic River (2003)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
influenced Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015)
Themes Visuals
But like Clint Eastwood's Mystic River , to which it's been compared, Prisoners is so artfully shaped and forcefully developed that objections fade.
He fares impressively in the film, which is reminiscent of “Mystic River,” “In the Bedroom” and the crime dramas of David Fincher.
Villeneuve, who directed the fascinating 2010 film Incendies, plays with echoes of many of the better crime films of the past two decades, including The Vanishing, Mystic River , Gone Baby Gone , and, most notably, David Fincher's multiple contributions to the genre.
Along the route, the tone does shift from taut procedural (in the vein of, say, Zodiac) to something a little more melodramatic (think of the breathless Mystic River).
Shot in the hues of a cold rain by Roger A. Deakins ("No Country for Old Men," "Skyfall"), the film's missing-child-in-a-close-knit-community-with-secrets story is reminiscent of "Mystic River" while the police investigation in a rural blue collar town has the flavor of "Silence of the Lambs."
Prisoners is a heavy movie exploring serious themes, similar to the contemporary prestige procedurals Zodiac and Mystic River .
Instead, Villeneuve's film asserts its place among far more nuanced interplanetary explorations such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact and the more ponderous (and far less humanistic) Interstellar, as well as in a venerable tradition of cerebral literary sci-fi.
And it's not the first to have a smart woman assigned to powhiri visitors from another galaxy - before Amy Adam's linguist in this, there was Jodie Foster's radio astronomer in 1997's Contact.
Rather than focusing on action, Arrival instead veers much more towards the themes of Sphere (which starred Hoffman) or Contact, in that the world's scientists, rather than its soldiers, form the core team around which the story revolves.
Working from a screenplay by Eric Heisserer, adapted from a Ted Chiang short story, he is operating in the vein of “Contact,” “Signs,” “Interstellar,” and Steven Spielberg’s close-encounters films this time.
Arrival, which owes a debt of influence to everything from Contact to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind to the heady blockbusters of Christopher Nolan, can’t quite be called hard sci-fi; like The Martian , it simplifies complicated processes for multiplex consumption, and the conflict involving the boneheaded military honchos impeding Louise and Ian’s process is practically prehistoric in its formula.
Working from a thoughtful script by Eric Heisserer (“Lights Out”) and a superb, quietly interior performance by Adams, Villeneuve has crafted a movie akin to “ Close Encounters of the Third Kind ” and “ Contact ”: an imaginative, escapist what-if scenario overlaid with semi-profound questions about fate, loss and the meaning of love.
The nod to 1951’s classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” seems overt, too, with its message that humans need to make peace and find common ground at the risk of becoming alien snack food.
The real touchstone here is Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, which used a sci-fi apparatus to argue for universal brotherhood.
It reminds me most of the 1951 sci-fi classic, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
Like the iconic 1951 thriller “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” it ratchets up exceptional tension between hopefulness and paranoia.
It features phenomenal special effects and many shivery-good moments, but “Arrival” is at bottom a resolutely old-fashioned movie, essentially an update of 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
More “Contact” than the 1951 version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (Did I mention that Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!” is one my favorite alien-encounter films?), “Arrival” does not bode well for “Blade Runner 2049,” which Villeneuve is currently directing.
Weapons suffers from the same issues as many mysteries of the same ilk (thinking of Prisoners) where it teeters the longer it progresses.
Like one of its inspirations, Prisoners, this film is a deep, dark rabbit hole you’ll want to keep tumbling down.
…the glum dad (Josh Brolin in this case) from "missing children" thrillers like Prisoners…
Tonally, the film resembles Denis Villeneuve’s dark 2013 missing child drama Prisoners…
Archer might envision himself as the vengeful dad from Prisoners (2013), but he’s closer to the woodcutter in a fairy tale – and not one of the more effective woodcutters, either.
It reminded me of Denis Villeneuve’s lurid missing children thriller Prisoners…
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
influenced Sicario (2015)
Plot Visuals Themes Characters
The film, whose initial trailers made it look like Traffic Redux thanks to the war-on-drugs subject matter and the casting of Benicio Del Toro, has already been compared to Zero Dark Thirty , and it’s easy to see why: It takes on a seemingly unwinnable policy war, it delves into the fuzzy legalities of fighting said war, it places a tough woman at its center, and it concludes with an extended raid sequence (even borrowing the earlier picture’s copious infrared and night vision photography).
Psychologically, by situating an idealistic heroine at the heart of a militarized manhunt and forcing her to confront its sordid ethical realities, Sicario clearly aims to be the Mexican drug war’s Zero Dark Thirty (also on a visual level Villeneuve borrows a lot from Kathryn Bigelow’s film, for example a lengthy night-time ambush rendered in night-vision).
But Sicario emerges, less typical G-man thriller than something akin to Michael Mann's Heat or a Zero Dark Thirty substituting the War on Terror for the War on Drugs.
In a terrific performance that recalls the steely ferocity of Jodie Foster in “The Silence of the Lambs” and Jessica Chastain in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Emily Blunt stars here as Kate Macer, an FBI field agent who has been forced to don a Teflon exterior in order to rise through the Bureau’s male-dominated ranks, and to cope with the depravity she frequently witnesses in the line of duty.
The movie sometimes feels like "Zero Dark Thirty" and has a title (which in Jerusalem refers to a person hunting Roman invaders and means "hit man" in Mexico) that sounds like "Syriana," but "Sicario" is simpler than both of those—thankfully, to an extent, as how many people can actually explain all of "Syriana"?
To compare to Sicario to Heat or Zero Dark Thirty or even, for one or two brief flashes, Apocalypse Now , is not out of line.
They don't start firing lasers like "War of the Worlds" or blowing up the White House like "Independence Day."
Scripted by Eric Heisserer based on Story of Your Life, by short-fiction writer Ted Chiang, Arrival is more or less the anti-Independence Day.
But unlike your typical "Independence Day" fare, "Arrival" is more focused on the suspense and nuance of an actual alien encounter.
That's what Arrival tries to capture, in its own low-key, non-Independence Day kind of way.
Beginning conventionally in the vein of an Independence Day or The Day The Earth Stood Still, the film opens with the sudden arrival of twelve mysterious alien spaceships in various locations around the world.
While sci-fi fans might flock to see the thing thinking that it’s some alien invasion epic like an Independence Day, this is more strange and even cerebral, and is less about ‘Them’ than ‘Us’, and how powerful our words can be – especially when misinterpreted.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
influenced Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016)
Characters Visuals Themes
For as wonderfully wonky as Arrival can be about language (including the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and putting the science back in science fiction, the story also locates the universal in the specific perspective of Banks, who has to deal with powerful personal emotions as part and parcel of talking to the aliens (similar to the professional-personal dynamic facing Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs).
It’s something close in style to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) — so close that it borrows a trick or two from that film.
The other superb movie Prisoners reminded me of, even though it’s not really very similar at all, is The Silence of the Lambs.
The movie's pop Guignol recalls The Silence of the Lambs , and also draws on David Fincher's Zodiac .
In so many Hollywood films about child kidnapping, “RANSOM,” “MAN ON FIRE,” “TAKEN” and “THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS,” to name just a few, the mothers of the missing children are concerned – nothing more.
But come the climactic confrontation—the best bearding-the-demon-in-its-lair scenes since The Silence of the Lambs—the film has won back its credit.
Interstellar (2014)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
influenced Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Themes
“Arrival,” like “Interstellar,” “The Martian” and “Gravity” before it, is a well-crafted and smart film using a huge canvas extending into the cosmos to explore and discover what brings out the best in humans.
Instead, Villeneuve's film asserts its place among far more nuanced interplanetary explorations such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact and the more ponderous (and far less humanistic) Interstellar, as well as in a venerable tradition of cerebral literary sci-fi.
Compared to more recent fare, it's a heady entry in a preholiday release slot that has seen the likes of "Gravity," "Interstellar" and "The Martian" over the last three years.
Credit Eric Heisserer (Lights Out, the 2011 The Thing) for the smart screenplay, which helps Arrival to play out like a more cerebral The Abyss or a more accessible Interstellar.
Working from a screenplay by Eric Heisserer, adapted from a Ted Chiang short story, he is operating in the vein of “Contact,” “Signs,” “Interstellar,” and Steven Spielberg’s close-encounters films this time.
Arrival is a big budget sci-fi film with a smaller, more pensive, cleverer film trying to get out, which has to be an improvement on a dumb film with an even dumber film trying to get out, as in the manner of Interstellar, say.
And it achieves its art-house bona fides by borrowing from the vengeful-parent motif of the 2001 In the Bedroom.
He fares impressively in the film, which is reminiscent of “Mystic River,” “In the Bedroom” and the crime dramas of David Fincher.
Fully deserving of mention in the same breath as “Seven,” “Mystic River” and “In the Bedroom,” this Sept. 20 Warners release may prove too intense for some viewers, but should ride strong reviews and word of mouth to above-average R-rated returns.
In “In the Bedroom,” a much superior film about a decent, law-abiding man who takes revenge on his son’s killer, the horror was in seeing how a good man could be twisted into a savagery beyond his own comprehension.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Directed by Irvin Kershner
influenced Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Dune (2021)
Themes
Craftsmen like Denis Villeneuve are busy chiselling out epic stories in recent years, but even with the technology advances in today’s day and age, or the proficiency of the French Canadian director, that wide-eyed, endlessly curious, consciously silly, and consistently heartfelt approach to storytelling makes Star Wars so much more endearing than his Dune (2021-24) film series.
If one was to compare this to the Star Wars franchise, it’s more like The Empire Strikes Back , which took chances, than The Force Awakens , which reworked previous themes and ideas.
But I confess, I wanted the sequel to be a match for the original, the way “The Godfather, Part II” and “Empire Strikes Back” were.
Sequels that do this well become almost mythical: “The Godfather Part II,” “Star Trek II,” “Toy Story 2,” the almighty “Empire Strikes Back.”
The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Aliens most regularly appear among the best examples, but Blade Runner 2049 may over time join their ranks.
Ad Astra (2019)
Directed by James Gray
influenced by Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Arrival (2016)
Visuals Themes Music Plot
As such, Gray has given the movie has a slow, thoughtful pace, reminiscent of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival .
Truthfully, Gray’s feature rather terrifically splits the difference between the high-momentum survival thrills of Gravity and Interstellar and artier, more ruminative sci-fi touchstones: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972) The Fountain (2006), Melancholia (2011), Arrival (2016), and Claire Denis’ recent, slippery contribution to that sub-genre, High Life .
The score from Max Richter might sound familiar because he’s worked on The Leftovers and Villeneuve’s Arrival, but it’s also evocative and enveloping, especially during a third-action scene that brings to mind Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity.
Like a number of recent, thoughtful science fiction films, including Ex Machina (2015), Arrival (2016), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Ad Astra is decidedly more interested in its philosophical underpinnings than its excitable surface of danger and adventure.
Then, we have the gangly monsters in “Arrival” (2016), which somehow enable the linguist, played by Amy Adams, to reach out to her daughter, who is yet to be born.
Max Richter’s score is an enchanting blend of traditional orchestral melodies and gentle electronica – another notch on the composer’s sci-fi list after his invaluable contribution to 2016’s Arrival with On The Nature Of Daylight .
After David Lean, whose Lawrence of Arabia served as inspiration for Herbert’s desert-set sci-fi saga, passed, the project fell into the hands of Chilean mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky, who envisioned it as his Remembrance of Things Past—a 10-hour epic featuring Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dali, with music by Pink Floyd.
Some comparisons can be made to the film Lawrence of Arabia from the desert landscape to the theme of finding your identity by being in contact with other cultures.
And the cinematic style is “Lawrence of Arabia” meets “Triumph of the Will” meets the most visionary cologne commercial that Ridley Scott never made.
Pulling from Frank Herbert’s landmark science fiction novel—or about half of it, anyway—Villeneuve reaches for an epic on the scale of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings while also not so subtly evoking imagery from the ultimate desert odyssey, Lawrence of Arabia .
If Blade Runner was interested in who can be truly considered human, and how that’s linked to our ability as a species to feel empathy for others, Blade Runner 2049 is more interested in the question of freedom, in a manner that recalls much recent blockbuster entertainment from Twin Peaks: The Return and Westworld to Alien: Covenant and even The Good Place.
Our current moment is that of Westworld on TV and Her and Ex Machina at the multiplex.
Again, it’s impossible to talk about specifics, but I will say that while K is working through many of the same questions introduced in the original–the same questions at the heart of Westworld or Ex-Machina or any brilliant examination of artificial intelligence–2049‘s exploration hit me in a visceral way, not necessarily harder but definitely different from Blade Runner.
(The movie shares a strong DNA with HBO’s Westworld in this regard.)
— was hashed out more organically in the first film and has been parsed to death in movies and TV shows like “AI: Artificial Intelligence,” “Her,” “Westworld,” and “Humans.”
And in much the way that HBO's "Westworld" brought fresh considerations to Michael Crichton's movie, this 35-years-later sequel introduces ideas and concerns about renegade robots and artificial intelligence that feel very much suited to where we are now.
It only recalls a similar scene in Spike Jonze’s Her , which covered this movie’s themes more powerfully.
It’s the movie’s most potentially poignant idea—the robot and the hologram, acting out a facsimile of domestic bliss—and it leads to scenes, like a strange act of consummation, that seem as indebted to Spike Jonze’s aching sci-fi daydream Her as to its own iconic inspiration.
K’s girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas) recalls Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, in which a human falls in love with his computer’s new operating system.
K himself has a holographic girlfriend (think Her ) named Joi (Ana de Armas) who feels and emotes, and is easily the most human of any character in the film.
Here, Ford plays the character as an even more cynical, embittered individual.
There are no new ideas here, poignancy achieved by rehashing moments of the original film with dollops applied from Spielberg's "A.I." and Spike Jonze's "Her."
Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
influenced Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Arrival (2016), Sicario (2015)
Themes
Maybe, as with “Close Encounters” and "Blade Runner" we will have to wait years until a definitive director's cut is issued.
If the gatekeepers of classic screen sci-fi are at all anxious about the stamp that director Denis Villeneuve might put on his upcoming Blade Runner project — a sequel coming 35 years after the iconic original — then the class, intelligence and cool visual style of Arrival should provide reassurance.
Denis Villeneuve , the French-Canadian director best known for stylish crime movies Incendie and Sicario, has always loved science fiction (he’s currently remaking Blade Runner).
Villeneuve, the director of “Sicario,” “Prisoners” and the upcoming “Blade Runner” sequel, shows humankind on a knife’s edge balance between finding peace or facing its destruction.
His next film is the long-awaited “Blade Runner” sequel, to which he’ll hopefully bring quiet, contemplative moments alongside high-tech wonderment.
Confidently directed by French-Canadian film-maker Denis Villeneuve, making his first foray into the sci-fi genre before the forthcoming Blade Runner sequel, Arrival charts a bold course between the guiding stars of Robert Zemeckis’s Contact and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind , with just a hint of the gravitational pull of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris .
Villeneuve, who directed the fascinating 2010 film Incendies, plays with echoes of many of the better crime films of the past two decades, including The Vanishing, Mystic River , Gone Baby Gone , and, most notably, David Fincher's multiple contributions to the genre.
It joins films like “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone” as touchstone works about such tragedies.
It's an anguished ordeal of a movie, its two and a half hours soaked with freezing rain, anxiety and nods to Silence of The Lambs, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and everything Michael Haneke ever did.
Its child abduction story might seem to put it alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River or Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone.
Admirers of Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” and Ben Affleck’s “Gone Baby Gone” – films that deserved more awards season acclaim than they received – will feel right at home here.
It may not have the endlessly pummeling effect of Mystic River or Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, but in terms of child-abduction thrillers, it's engaging and gut-wrenching—without diving into an abyss of emotional torture in the name of entertainment.
Much like Arrival, this is an alien film that is ultimately about communication, understanding, and empathy.
Seeing this really makes me appreciate Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival even more. It skillfully pivots from the typical alien story clichés to present a sophisticated, nuanced, deeply emotional, and character-focused narrative.
This latest effort bears a striking resemblance to Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which is not a bad thing at all.
The handful of truly great alien films we’ve witnessed in the last 15 years, notably Arrival, Nope (also Universal!), Under the Skin and Super 8 (which Spielberg produced), only serve to underline how unfortunate this feels.