I've always been fascinated by tracing how the world would react to a public alien Arrival; in my novel draft, and in of my screenplays, most of the narrative leads up to the arrival, which will solve a mystery (and provide a sense of initiation). In my cases, some of the suspense is indeed interpersonal. I think I have a more complicated concept than this film by Denis Villeneuve, based on Ted Chiang's 'Story of Your Life'.
The film opens with a shot of a gray ceiling with nice designs, before we see linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) looking out of a lake (maybe Flathead, near Kalispell, Montana, which I have driven around) near her home, remembering the passing of her little girl Hannah to an aggressive brain cancer, which we will later learn was cause by a bizarre virus that enables the 'sufferer' to experience space-time in a tesseract (like in 'Interstellar'). In my novel, I introduce the idea of a novel retrovirus (incorporating micro black holes ) that can convey some people unusual powers, but I won�t get into that here. Hannah's name is a palindrome, and that becomes important (the last movement of Hindemith's Horn Concerto is also a palindrome).
Soon Banks is lecturing about what makes Portuguese interesting as a language, when her students start seeing news on their phones and laptops, and interrupt her, to turn on the TV. The spaceships have suddenly arrived within the last hour, and the world is in a panic. There are twelve of them.
Soon the Army is recruiting her to come out to the spaceship site in rural Montana. You have to go through decontamination to get in and out of the spaceship (not quite as bad as the 'body analysis' of 'The Andromeda Strain' thankfully no photoflash chamber). The ship is a large' ovoid, maybe 1000 feet high and you wait under it for a door to open.
Once inside, you are elevated through a tunnel with wall designs like those of Louise's ceiling. Eventually, you get to meet the aliens. Usually, you see the bottoms of their bodies looking like cephalopods, with seven arms, each of which ends in a tentacle that can expand into seven more hooks for writing messages that look like circular Rorschachs. Most of the time, the real bodies (like stalks) are enshrouded in fog.
It's not too much of a spoiler to say that the non-linear nature of the alien language provides a key to how they experience time and can accomplish space travel. It also excuses the out-of-sequence flashbacks and flash forwards (like in the ABC series 'Flash Forward').
Suffice it to say, also, that the look of the film becomes fixated on the aliens and the images of their writings. It doesn't who a lot of scenery, except a few shots of the shops in other places like Shanghai. A lot of the time, the movie seems to be almost in black and white.
The other aspect of this film is, of course, world politics especially when China, Russia, and then other third world countries want to go their own way, which in this situation could threaten the planet. 'China is not your friend' Trump has said. Like neither was the tiger Richard Parker ('Pi') until he was.
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