Arrival [**SPOILERS FROM POST 45 ONWARD**]

Ever since Denis Villeneuve broke Hollywood, I've found all his films to be varying degrees of fascinating, but also varying degrees of not quite there. Arrival carries on this trend - but it's particularly fascinating and only a little short of being all there.

Like Sicario, it is hard to fault the stylistic accomplishments of the film. It maintains a truly individual tone throughout, emphasised by its assured cinematography and deeply integrated soundtrack. It's the sort of film that can make an establishing shot stand out - the arrival at base camp, for example, manages to articulate genuine scale, mystery, atmosphere and strange beauty. The scene immediately prior to that stood out too, where the characters attempt to hold a conversation on a helicopter. It was a curiously delivered scene in the moment (thanks in large part to the sound design) but looking back it's even more noteworthy for subtly establishing some of the key themes of challenging communication in what could have been just a fairly rote exposition sequence.

It is an ideas-rich film - weighed down by procedural stuff and exposition from time to time, but mostly confident in discussing and exploring many of the theories, themes and scientific ponderings it puts forward. What I found a bit of a shame was that it felt like the form and narrative weren't operating in total harmony at times (although the score does a great job throughout). Sometimes they were, and it was magnificent: the opening shots and was a really effective visual of communicating what was happening without having to be explicitly told it. Would have loved to see more of that ala the sort of thing Shane Carruth does in his films. There are clearly a few concessions to commercial interests here though, not least a few more setpiece like sequences and that work well enough but perhaps distract from the really interesting things. While there's definitely some fetching effects work here and some confident production design, the CG doesn't always keep up with what's meant to be happening ( ). It may seem strange to say about a very unusually sombre and restrained mainstream sci-fi movie, but I reckon this could have been even stronger if operating on a smaller scale again.

I went out and bought a copy of Story of Your Life the day after watching this, and that beautiful little short story really helped both reinforce both the strengths and weaknesses of the film. It goes far further with its ideas than the film - the consequences of Dr Banks' discovery are explored in much more theoretical depth; the science is considerably harder; the aliens and their language are more potently described; the narrative far less reliant on contrived tension. Particularly impressed at how much more deeply the revelations and are woven into the story - .

At the same time, it also highlighted how Arrival is a confident and interesting take on Chiang's story that is accessible in a very positive way. It is diluted in many respects, but it also retains many of the ideas and even performs its own riffs on them. It very much 'adapts' the story - sometimes for worse, but regularly for better too. It's not perfect - he's getting closer though! - but Arrival absolutely again suggests that Villeneuve is doing some really interesting and accomplished things within the limited remit of mid to high budget American cinema.