FAR OUT
In the movie The Arrival aliens land on earth in vessels shaped like giant Brazil nuts, that hover on one end just above the ground. Humans enter them from below, in genie lifts, and struggle to understand their language and their intentions. The aliens look like octopi with seven legs and a hairy, wrinkled trunk. They float around the top of the vessels in clouds of steam, behind windows that look like giant iPOD screens. And they communicate in inky, circular squirts that look like the stains coffee cups leave on magazine covers.
The premise of the movie
(based on a short story by Ted Chiang)
is intriguing, but the special effects don’t serve it well. While watching, I could only think back wistfully to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Though that movie used mechanical effects that are far cruder than the digital ones employed in The Arrival, they were conceived simply and poetically, and strengthened belief in the story, and in the aliens themselves. In Close Encounters the spacecraft looks like an aluminum toy – a child’s vision of a spaceship. Its insides glow like the sun, and the short, big-headed aliens descend from it on stumpy, uncertain legs like infants. These designs have an elemental, archetypical feeling – they tap our emotional connection to well-known earthly things. In The Arrival the designs are at once too strange, and too banal, to believe.