It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie the week podcast, to put it to a classic film and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here again with... Genevieve Kosky. Scott Tobias. Tasha Robinson. In the first half of this conversation, we talked about Contact, Robert Zemeckis' 1997 adaptation of scientist Carl Sagan's novel about the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe. and what might happen if we found some? In arrival, Earth doesn't have to search at all. Instead, aliens just show up without explaining what they want or whether or not they come in peace. It's a science fiction set up almost as old as science fiction itself. The aliens are here. What do they want? But it's one made lyrical, disorienting, and emotional by Denis Villeneuve's approach to the material.

The film opens with Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, recalling the life and ultimately the loss of her daughter to cancer,

via scenes shot in tight, lovely, malloc-worthy compositions.

It then connects that loss in ways that will only become fully clear later to Louise's attempts to speak

to a pair of aliens who express themselves via complex visual symbols. They have something important

to say, and Louise knows she can grasp it. But as tensions mount around the globe, time might not be on

her side. All the while, the film grows at once dreamier and more unsettling. Villeneuve makes it clear

that cataclysm was just one miscommunication

away between the aliens or the humans attempting to understand them. The situation

spends out of control just as Louise's grasp on reality starts to slip. We'll talk about

arrival and more after the break.

More objects have landed around the world.

This is one of 12.

I'm never going to be able to speak their words.

Got two days.

Figured something out.

I am human.

It's their language.

We need to make sure that they understand the difference between a weapon and a tool.

...