In this list, David Roche, author of Arrival, recommends a few films that live in the orbit of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film. Spanning several decades, Roche’s list considers works in and beyond the sci-fi film canon, and draws connections between auteurs, thematic elements, and even visual cues borrowed and exchanged across films.
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Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Unlike Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky is not, to my knowledge, a director who has ever been cited by Villeneuve as a notable influence. However, it is hard not to see this adaptation of Russian author Stanisław Lem’s famous novel as a model of “serious” science fiction for the likes of Steven Soderbergh (who readapted the novel in 2002), Christopher Nolan, and Denis Villeneuve. In Solaris, as in Arrival, the encounter with an alien planet provokes turmoil in the protagonist’s mental life, and the film invites us to experience the fragmentation of subjectivity.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)
This 1977 blockbuster seems to be the movie that modernized the alien invasion films of the 1950s. It also happens to be Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s favorite science fiction film, and it is hard not to see it as a sort of template for the film adaptation of Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” Many elements from the 1977 film’s final act, set at Devil’s Tower National Monument, Wyoming, are transposed onto the Montana site of Arrival, notably the mountain landscape and Gothic spaceships whose sublime quality is enhanced by a sense of scale and bathed in an ethereal mist.
Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997)
Based on astronomer Carl Sagan’s work, Contact is one of those Hollywood oddities: a blockbuster hard science fiction film starring Jodie Foster. Comparing Contact and Arrival certainly sheds light on both the evolution of gender politics and the seriousness of hard science fiction in Hollywood: Jodie Foster shares the star credits with Matthew McConaughey, whose character is clearly secondary and serves to shift the focus away from science onto religion.
Un 32 août sur terre (Denis Villeneuve, 1998)
Before his Hollywood career, Villeneuve had already been making French-language films for over twelve years in Quebec, and the 2010 Incendies had even represented Canada at the Academy Awards. His first feature film, Un 32 août sur terre, has many generic and thematic affinities with Arrival: a female lead; an interest in landscapes; a science fiction premise involving temporality, since the events occur on August 32; and a narrative centered on the attempt to find meaning and balance between mortality and maternity.
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)
Christopher Nolan and Devis Villeneuve have repeatedly expressed their admiration for each other’s films. In many ways, Interstellar set out with the same goals as Arrival: offering a hard science fiction that would straddle the fine line between popular entertainment and art cinema, and in which geopolitics (in this case, climate change) provide the backdrop to the ethical questions raised by parent-child relations.
David Roche is a professor of film studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and an Institut Universitaire de France member. He is the author of Meta in Film and Television Series and Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction, and coeditor of Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film.
