Arrival

By David Roche

SERIES: 21st Century Film Essentials

University of Texas Press

A study of Denis Villeneuve’s genre-transcendent film.

In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), scientists must decipher the language of and peacefully communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth before the world’s military attacks. In this first book-length study of the film, scholar David Roche argues that it is one of the most important films of this century, and the most brilliant science fiction film since Blade Runner. Roche posits Arrival as a blockbuster with artistic ambitions—an argument supported by the film’s several Academy Award nominations—and looks closely at how the film engages with theoretical questions posed by contemporary film studies and philosophy alike. Each section explores a central aspect of the film: its status as an auteur adaptation; its relation to the science fiction genre; its themes of communication on narrative and meta-narrative levels; its aesthetics of time and space; and the political and ethical questions it raises. Ultimately, Roche declares Arrival a unique, multifaceted experience in the world of hard science fiction films, placing it in context with works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact while also examining how it bridges the gap between genre and art house cinema.

David Roche’s superb book approaches Arrival from a remarkable number of analytical angles, deftly teasing out the film’s layers of meaning using linguistics, cultural theory, moral philosophy, cognitive psychology, and close formal analysis. This is a significant contribution to science fiction film studies that will illuminate your rewatches of a great film. Bradley Schauer, author of Escape Velocity: American Science Fiction Film, 1950–1982

David Roche is a professor of film studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and an Institut Universitaire de France member. He is the author of Meta in Film and Television Series and Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction, and coeditor of Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film.