Crushing On Movie Club Presents: Arrival (2016)

Adapted By…: Arrival (2016)

What happens when a film takes a short story and turns it into something bigger, stranger and deeply cinematic?

This September, Crushing On Movie Club is exploring the art of adaptation with Adapted By…celebrating films that have transformed stories from books, plays, poems, articles, television and beyond into something entirely their own.

Our film of the month is Denis Villeneuve’s haunting and beautiful Arrival (2016), adapted from Ted Chiang’s acclaimed short story Story of Your Life.

When mysterious alien spacecraft appear across the globe, linguist Louise Banks is recruited to communicate with the beings inside them. As she begins to unravel their language, Louise discovers that understanding another way of communicating may mean fundamentally changing the way we understand time, memory, and our own lives.

But Arrival isn't simply a sci-fi film about aliens. It's a story about language, grief, love, choice and the limits of human understanding, brought to the screen through Villeneuve's atmospheric direction, Jóhann Jóhannsson's haunting score and Amy Adams' extraordinary central performance.

For our September meeting, we'll be thinking about the film as an adaptation: What changes when a story moves from the page to the screen? What does the film add, remove or reimagine? And when an adaptation takes a story somewhere unexpected, does it remain faithful to its source or does that even matter?

Come along for an evening of film, conversation, snacks and a little bit of existential pondering. ??

Film: Arrival (2016)

Adapted from: Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner & Forest Whitaker

Come for the aliens. Stay for the feelings.