It’s a rare thing these days if we get an alien invasion flick that doesn’t feature extraterrestrials out to destroy the world. It seems that aliens wanting to interact with Earthlings rather than destroy them have been long gone since the days of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “E.T.” But perhaps we’ll get some aliens a bit more interested in diplomacy with the new film “Arrival,” for which the first trailer just hit.
Amy Adams stars as Louise Banks, a linguistic expert who is recruited by the government to make first contact with an alien species after their pods enter the atmosphere. Louise must translate an extraterrestrial language and decode the aliens’ message and respond without, say, being annihilated. “As mankind teeters on the verge of global war,” the official synopsis continues, “Banks and the team race against time for answers — and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity.”
The trailer doesn’t reveal the aliens just, yet; they may be reserved for the full-length trailer that will be released on August 16. But as Adams told USA Today, their look is “different than what you would have thought.”
As Adam’s co-star, Jeremy Renner explains, “Arrival” is more like, “if you blended a [Stanley] Kubrick and a Spielberg movie,” instead of a “big Michael Bay alien movie.” A thinking woman’s sci-fi film is exactly what we need. Not since Jodie Foster’s “Contact” in 1997 have we seen a female-led alien sci-fi film that deals more with intellectual themes rather than an action focus.
“Arrival” will play at TIFF and Venice and hits U.S. theaters on November 11. Check out the tense trailer below.
