The planet, we
are informed, is warming. The ice caps are melting. Climates are changing.
Scientists blame factory smokestacks, car exhausts, and the destruction of the
rain forests; The Arrival' has a more terrifying hypothesis to explain the
phenomenon.
In the great
paranoid tradition of science fiction, the discovery of this possibility is made
by someone who cannot get anyone to listen to him, and who grows desperate as
the establishment slams its doors. The man is Zane Zaminski, a radio astronomer
who listens for signs of intelligence from outer space. Unlike his colleagues,
he's looking in the noisy FM band: “It's like searching for a needle," his
partner tells him, “in a haystack of needles." When he picks up an unmistakable
signal, Zane takes it gleefully to his boss, only to be told that the
government's entire intergalactic eavesdropping operation is being scaled down
because of budget cutbacks.
Zane is dumped
from his job but cannot shake the conviction that he did indeed hear an
intelligent signal from another planet. He's kind of a nerd with a goatee and a
pocket protector who can duplicate a science lab in his own attic with a couple
of good computers and a soldering iron. Aided by a smart kid from next door, he
soon has his own listening station up and running. His method for duplicating a
big government radio telescope is ingenious: He gets a job as a repairman for
consumer satellite dishes, secretly wires them into a network and puts together
his own ``phased array'' to listen to space.
His
investigation of the signals leads him to Mexico, where he encounters another
scientist, Dr. Ilana Green. She’s been investigating dramatic environmental
changes in the Antarctic, and together they speculate about global warming and
its possible connection to the strange situations they encounter in a small
central village in central Mexico. At one point, frightened by where her
reasoning is leading her,she sighs, " Sometimes I get so apocalyptic."
The Arrival
stays with its thesis all the way to the end, and is always intelligent, and
clear about its science, its plot, its characters and its meaning. It has a
chilling hypothesis: Earth is being ‘terraformed' by an alien species that would
prefer the planet a little warmer before it moves in. This movie fulfills one of
the classic functions of science fiction: to take a current trend and extend it
to a possible—and alarming--future. Unlike other films which assumed that alien
invaders would be monsters, The Arrival gives its aliens credit for reasoning
that we might almost be tempted to agree with. “We're just finishing what you
started,” one of the aliens tells Zane, referring to the smokestacks, auto
exhausts, rain forests and so on. “What would have taken you100 years will only
take us 10.” He, or it, has a point.
