Film Arrival – reviewed by a UFO expert

 by Nick Pope

A scene from the sci-fi thriller Arrival

What does Arrival have to say about our readiness to deal with aliens? Nick Pope, who was responsible for investigating UFO sightings during his time with the Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, watched the new sci-fi blockbuster

Extraterrestrials arrive on Earth in giant spaceships, and the world holds its breath as we wait to see if they’ll be friendly, or whether this is the beginning of an alien invasion. So far, so Hollywood.

But what if we can’t figure out what they want – how would we communicate with them? This intriguing question forms the central premise of Arrival, and to help figure things out the military call in a linguist, Dr. Louise Banks, superbly played by Amy Adams. Her backstory involves the death of her daughter, but while this is a plotline that has the potential to take us into clichéd territory, it’s deftly handled and turns out to be relevant.

“I’ve often been asked if there’s a government contingency plan for dealing with extraterrestrial visitation. There isn’t.”

This is a movie that resonates with me personally. I worked for the Ministry of Defence for 21 years and for much of the early Nineties I was posted to a section where my duties included researching and investigating the UFO phenomenon.

I’ve often been asked if there’s a government contingency plan for dealing with extraterrestrial visitation. There isn’t, but director Denis Villeneuve’s film may have you thinking it might not be such a bad idea to draw one up.

Communication and the potential for miscommunication are central themes, as illustrated by a clever discussion about the potential confusion between a tool and a weapon. There’s enough technical material about the theory and structure of language to make us appreciate the problem, but not so much that the movie gets bogged down in over-technicality.

This is definitely a movie with a message. In parallel with the struggle to establish meaningful communication with the extraterrestrials, it’s clear that with alien craft hovering over a variety of different terrestrial powers and superpowers, perhaps the biggest danger comes from our failure to properly communicate with each other: astrophysicists with linguists, military with scientists, East with West. Amy

Adams as Dr Louise Banks in Arrival

Cleverly, the military are neither eulogised nor demonised in this film, and this entire aspect of the movie is focused on the character of the senior officer in charge of the US response, Colonel Weber.

Weber’s character is played with considerable sensitivity by Forest Whitaker – the steel is clearly there, but there’s a counter-intuitive quietness about him, that helps us steer clear of sci-fi clichés and get to the deeper and more thoughtful core.

• Arrival review: a refreshingly intelligent slice of sci-fi

In a similar vein, the spaceships and the aliens are well-designed, but never threaten to take over the movie.

Arrival is sci-fi at its best: visually stunning for sure, but with such a good story at its heart that it never needs to rely on special effects to bail it out.

It seems that hardly a week goes by now without some new exoplanet being discovered, coupled with speculation that it’s only a matter of time before we discover alien life.

Arrival made me look back fondly at my old MoD job, and did make me wonder whether it wouldn’t be prudent to draw up a plan for what to do if any of this ever happened for real.

Arrival is in cinemas now

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