[CRITICAL] FIRST CONTACT

Unlikely, the French title of the new Denis Villeneuve makes it much more justice to the film than that of the original version (Arrival). It is brutal (Alien, James Cameron), spectacular (the War of The Worlds, Steven Spielberg), funny (Mars Attack, Tim Burton) or wonderful (E. T the extraterrestrial, Steven Spielberg again), the first contact between the viewer and an entity alien is always an experience that puts us frontally in the face of the unknown. Our fantasies, our imagination cease to function, giving way to the discovery of a foreign body. It is also the expectation that the interest of the mechanics. This gives rise, in FIRST CONTACT, to a scene intense when Louise, as embodied by Amy Adams, gets for the first time in the ship. The staging extension the time, wife the point of view of the linguist to create an empathy maximum. His first contact it is also our own. We may well have seen a ton of variations in the genre, each new test is a return-to-zero, a dépucelage.What is strong, it is the ability of Denis Villeneuve to offer via this scene a climax before the hour. As if this arrival in the ship was already at the summit sensational film on the side of science-fiction. The discovery has passed, the film defuses any program spectacular to address themes other. He is the opposite of the tremendous Sicario, FIRST CONTACT , advocating appeasement, rather than the ups and muscular. The decorations remain in a form of simplicity, the plot is getting away from the city to be situated in a plain lost, the design of the aliens and what the surrounds do not aspire to any extravagance, A good part of the film, means back-and-forth between a military base and the monolithic ship black, preferring to talk about the problems of the people at the corner of a tv news. Despite this assumption to be minimal, by a quest for understanding – and not confrontation, the scenario happens to keep us brilliantly. That is not to say that the director is quebecois refuses the components of the gender it addresses. He goes there, while sticking to what his narrative needs, in order to maintain our curiosity unfulfilled.

“FIRST CONTACT is a film that is beautifully sensitive”

The sketch gives FIRST CONTACT a singularity breaking with the current standards. Has the image of the beautiful Midnight Special and its reflection on fatherhood, Denis Villeneuve takes a imaging, of codes known, to expound on our relationship to the other, and on the strength of the language, communication. In these times, when the influx of migrants explodes – and the ideological deviations that may arise, the science fiction is there to remind us that we are all foreign to someone as long as you don’t take the time to understand the medium of expression of others. It is me, and vice versa. The beautiful visual idea lies in the separation between the visitors from another world and humans : a window. This transparent surface makes the concept of separation in the abstract. Each looks at the other at the same time as her own person, as in a mirror. FIRST CONTACT could have been a great story pacific if it does not have swung not in a last time to the pure intimate drama. The flashbacks that kept coming back to find a justification that allows the film to achieve an emotional dimension to what is thought, up until then, stitched with white thread.It is necessary to wait for the final and the disappearance of the story of aliens for FIRST CONTACT reveals its essence. The scholarly pirouette story reconfigures the entire structure of the assembly that we could not enter that part in connection with the entanglement of past/present. What could be more logical, when a theme of the decoding, to propose a subject film in need of tools to identify everything about it. One of the virtues of FIRST CONTACT lies in the trust that it places on the time and to us, the spectators. In our ability to perform hand in hand, a journey into the unknown in the company of Louise. It is a pact of trust secret, identical to the one between the determined linguist and the aliens that stood between us and Villeneuve. The latter, by his staging, combining in a perfect harmony of virtuosity and efficiency, we place the same level of involvement of the brain, and emotional as its heroine – which was already the case of the Sicario , and Prisoners.

The decline in allowing the narrative to expose its side-sensitive to achieve the film its acme emotional. The melancholy that has been maturing since the first few seconds of mute to a vindication of the present moment. The failover of the most impressive works in this point, in this metamorphosis of the issues intended by the genre – an arrival of the aliens generates concerns about the future. Since the living being (and the world, on a broader scale) aspire by definition to have an end, so focus on the beauty of the moment at hand. It is almost a devotion to a monastic, to the difference in the world, a acceptance intimate of a dark future in order to take advantage of this radiant. It is life itself that seems to burst, leaving far behind the atmosphere of hushed, uncertain and bleak, which weighed on the quasi-totality of the film. It is thus necessary to wait until the last seconds to realize that Denis Villeneuve just spawned a film of incredible sensitivity, and to realize to what extent the choice of the French title, is a graceful accuracy. When Louise and Ian hug, we understand that it is at this moment that the real first contact has been taking place.

Maxime Bedini

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