Given director Denis Villeneuve's mastery of the crime thriller in Sicario and his thorough grasp of science fiction in his latest, Arrival, it would seem the upcoming Blade Runner 2049 is in good hands. In the vein of the kind of low-explosion, high-academics model of Contact and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and striking gold everywhere Interstellar failed, Arrival is the kind of smart, adult, speculative fiction the movies are sorely lacking these days.

Arrival starts with a short, moving montage showing the birth, life and early death of Louise Banks' (Amy Adams) daughter, under normal circumstances a sequence designed to tell us all we need to know about Louise. But this is Villeneuve we're talking about, so pay attention. From there we follow Louise through her vaguely melancholy life to the nearly deserted college classroom where she teaches. The few students in attendance are preoccupied with their phones, for good reason, and Louise eventually tunes into the news: Aliens have landed at 12 locations across the globe. The next thing she knows, she's off to the American site in Montana, where, as a prominent linguist, she starts work with army colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), anxious CIA agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg) and, most crucially, her partner in science, theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). The goal is simply to find out why the aliens are here.

Based on the short story Story of Your Life by scifi wunderkind Ted Chiang (anyone into scifi and unfamiliar with Chiang's work needs to remedy that), Arrival is the best kind of science fiction - the kind that balances the cerebral and the emotional, the scientific and philosophical, caution and optimism. Deliberate (some will say slow) without ever being unengaging, Arrival breaks the modern scifi movie mold at nearly every turn, but chiefly in its brains first, weapons second construction. London Bridge, the Sydney Opera House and the Statue of Liberty are spared destruction in Arrival, which audaciously puts a physicist and a linguist at its heroic center. Imagine that? A movie about alien contact that taps someone who considers aliens and one who considers forms of contact for a living for their help.

But that's not the only element that makes the film (better a second time) such a heady delight. A smart parable about communication, acceptance and a collective willingness to cooperate with "the other" is just what the doctor ordered right now, and Villeneuve and co-writer Eric Heisserer (a career best following Lights Out and The Thing) also find time to tackle dense questions about the nature of time and memory.

None of it would hold together without Adams' nuanced central performance as a professional who refuses to do her job anything but correctly, muted cinematography by Bradford Young (A Most Violent Year) and otherworldly visual effects by Louis Morin, whose heptabpods, as the aliens are dubbed, are initially frightening and eerily beautiful. As Louise slowly and methodically deciphers a language and connects to the heptapods more and more, her solitary nature and lingering personal pain make her increasingly susceptible to a bigger, more urgent message. That's when the story becomes even more demanding in the lead up to its final, emotional coda, all the while set to a haunting score by Jhann Jhannsson (who killed it on Sicario).

Arrival works (despite a few narrative burps) because it refuses to talk down to its audience (you may find yourself Googling a couple of math theories afterward) and never goes overboard with its obvious social message. Also like all good scifi, it's not about the future - it's about the here and now. So when the Chinese navy and Russian military react to a perceived threat, and the PLA general, Shang (Tzi Ma), ends up with the power to avert global catastrophe it rings true rather than pandering to a market (looking at you Independence Day: Resurgence).

(HK Edition 01/13/2017 page1)