Arrival
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter: Eric Heisserer
Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, Mark O’Brien, Sangita Patel
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Rated PG-13 | 116 Minutes
Release Date: November 11, 2016

“Where do they come from? What do they want?”

First contact, the introductory meeting between humanity and extraterrestrial life, was a common theme in the work of H. G. Wells, most notably in 1898’s The War of the Worlds and 1901’s The First Men in the Moon. The term itself, however, wasn’t coined until 1945, with American author Murray Leinster’s novelette, “First Contact.”

Since then, filmmakers have been fascinated by what that pivotal moment would be like, from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Independence Day (1996), and Contact (1997). Most recently, we’ve seen first contact “” combined with the message from space trope “” in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.