5 reasons you need to drag yourself out of the house and go see “Arrival” right now
It’s November, people, which means it’s “Quality Movie Season.” And one of the best movies in theaters right now is Arrival.
Arrival tells the story of Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams), a linguistics professor whose world is rocked when UFOs appear all over Earth.
Arrival is science fiction at its finest. It’s also just plain great movie-making at its finest. Here are all the reasons why you gotta book it to your nearest theater and catch a showing stat.
1. OMIGOD, AMY ADAMS, YOU GUYS.
Real talk, we, the movie-going public have been obsessed with Amy Adams since her screen debut in Drop Dead Gorgeous.
Five, count ’em, five Academy Awards nominations later, (Junebug, Doubt, The Fighter, The Master, and American Hustle for those keeping score at home) and Adams has become one of Hollywood’s greatest treasures.
Adams always brings her A-game to the silver screen, but the performance she turns in for Arrival is one of her best.
2. The supporting cast is also top-notch.
Jeremy Renner plays a theoretical physicist (and a pretty dreamy one at that) and Forest Whitaker plays U.S. Army Colonel Weber, who has a few killer one-liners up his sleeve.
3. The message of Arrival is that smart people can save the world.
Amy Adams’ Louise is a heroine who doesn’t wield artillery or run around showing off her mixed martial arts training. Her weapon of choice is her badass brain. She’s an academic who basically saves the world with her smarts. How’s that for an advertisement for the importance of a quality education?
It’s not often that you see an academic play superhero in a big film but that’s exactly what Amy Adams does here (and Jeremy Renner, playing a theoretical physicist, awesomely backs her up).
4. Arrival heralds a new age of “Classy Sci-Fi.”
With the last few years bringing us Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian, the “Classy Space Movie” is clearly here to stay. But we’re super-hoping that Arrival also makes the “Classy Sci-Fi” movie a thing, and we start seeing movies about aliens and time travel seriously vying for Oscars alongside all the costume dramas and biopics.
5. Arrival will inspire you to add to your reading list.
After seeing Arrival, you’re going to want to add Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others to your reading list, stat (the movie is based on the title story in the collection). We are dying to see what else Chiang’s brilliant brain has cooked up.
