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Arrival manages to achieve a rare thing in modern science fiction: a thought provoking, high-concept plot that remains coherent and compelling throughout. The premise of alien spacecraft suddenly arriving in Earth’s orbit will be familiar to most, but Arrival renews our interest by focusing upon hard hitting emotional moments. Arrival is less a movie about aliens than it is an exploration of humanity and our response to an unknown ‘other’.

Beginning with a moving montage of the birth, life and tragic death of the child of Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the movie’s focus remains on the human side of the story at all times. The aftermath of Banks’ loss is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of twelve alien spacecraft in supposedly random locations across Earth. Banks is recruited by the military due to her reputation as a linguist, and she is tasked with getting to grips with the alien’s language in order to allow for communication, joined by theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner).

The decision to frame our first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life around language rather than the traditional themes of war and annihilation is a welcome move, and indicative of how this is very much a movie of the our time. When Independence Day imagined mankind united against a common external threat in the 90s, it did so against a background of unparalleled global peace and the hegemony of the United States. Now, in a world that seems increasingly gripped by violence and instability every day, Arrival offers us a vision of mankind not only being able to break bread with fundamentally different beings, but more importantly, uniting ourselves through a commitment to communication rather than war.

This film isn’t afraid of difficult ideas, throwing in everything from linguistic theories about the role of language in shaping thought, to advanced physics and the basic philosophical question of what it means to connect with others. There will be inevitable comparisons to recent movies like Interstellar, but what separates Arrival is the skillful grounding of its high-concept and engaging ideas with moments that connect with the viewer on a human level.