Like ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Starman, Independence Day and a host of similar films over the past 30 years, Arrival explores the theme of an alien visitation to earth. In this version, Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) is a linguistic expert who is called upon by the US military to facilitate conversation with visitors from another world, whose spacecraft have landed (actually not quite landed, for they hover a few feet off the ground) at a number of locations around the globe.
This meditative film has a great deal to tell us about communication, language and the patience required to enter into the cultural environment of a higher intelligence. As such, it speaks, whether its director and writer intended it or not, about God’s distinctive manner of communication and the process by which we come to understand it.
