Released in US theatres just a week ago, Arrival is quickly shaping up to be the science fiction movie of the year, a turn of events that almost no one—including the author himself—would’ve guessed based on its premise.
The story follows linguist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) as they attempt to communicate with a pair of extraterrestrials whose spacecraft has just landed in Montana. For most of us, Arrival was just another entertaining alien flick, but for a handful of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researchers who are actually tasked with figuring out how to communicate with extraterrestrials, the film felt more like a documentary than a drama.
“I am so envious of Louise Banks because she gets to have a face to face with ET,” Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) International president Douglas Vakoch told Motherboard. “But in the scenarios that SETI and METI folks deal with there’s no possibility of that. Our idea of a snappy exchange with extraterrestrials is a decade—and that only works if the nearest star is populated.”
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