The Arrival

The Arrival

The planet, they say, is heating up. The ice caps are melting.

We have changing climates. Factories, cars and the destruction of rain forests are pointed to as being responsible by scientists. “The Arrival” offers a more terrifying explanation for this strange occurrence. It takes one person in the true paranoid tradition of science fiction who knows what’s happening but can’t get anyone to listen and becomes frantic when the establishment begins closing ranks against him.

That person is Charlie Sheen as Zane Zaminski, a radio astronomer who listens for signs of intelligence from outer space. He’s looking in the noisy FM band while all his colleagues look elsewhere: “It’s like searching for a needle,” says his partner, “in a haystack of needles.”

When he intercepts an unmistakable message, Zane triumphantly takes it to his boss (Ron Silver), only to be told that budget cuts necessitate shutting down the government’s entire intergalactic eavesdropping operation. This is where ” The Arrival” achieves escape velocity from most other summer movies: No sooner does Zane show us how high he can jump than we’re invited to join him in the air for a couple hours of twisty-turny fun and games.

“The Arrival” is never vague about its science, plot, characters and meaning, unlike “Mission: Impossible,” which goes for surface flash, visual impact and action. (Not that “Mission: Impossible” isn’t fun; I’m just making the comparison.) Zane is fired from his job but can’t shake the belief that he really did hear an intelligent signal from another planet. He’s kind of a geek with a goatee and a pocket protector, who can duplicate a science lab in his own attic with a couple of good computers and a soldering iron.

With the help of a smart kid from next door (Tony T. Johnson), he soon has his own listening station up and running. His method of duplicating a big government radio telescope is ingenious: He gets a job as a repairman for consumer satellite dishes, secretly wires them into a network and builds his own “phased array” to listen to space. I don’t know if this would work, but I like his style. His investigation of the signals takes him to Mexico, where he meets another scientist, played by Lindsay Crouse. We’ve seen her in the movie’s splendid opening sequence, which starts with her smelling a flower in a meadow, and then pulls back to show the meadow surrounded by thousands of square miles of arctic ice.

Together they speculate about global warming and its possible connection to the weird happenings they encounter in a small central Mexico village. At one point she sighs through clenched teeth she’s scared by where her reasoning’s leading her “I get so damned apocalyptic when I drink.” Don’t read past this point if you plan to see the film.What I admired about “The Arrival” is that it sticks with its argument right up until the end. It posits an eerie possibility: Earth is being” terraformed” by an alien species that would prefer it slightly warmer before moving in.

Combining this notion with a touch of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and some ambitious special effects, “The Arrival” keeps springing surprises right up until the end; it’s written and directed by David Twohy (“The Fugitive”), who never runs out of steam. Consider, for example, a nifty little spinning globe that appears to function as a vacuum cleaner, sucking everything into another dimension. The job it does on a giant radio telescope is one of the best recent uses of special effects.

There’s a shot where Zane’s fiancee (Teri Polo) rolls to the edge of the big dish; at first all we see is its vast white expanse, and then suddenly we see the earth below, spread out beneath her. The construction of the shot makes it into 10 seconds of just about perfect cinema. A lot of movies in this genre come apart at the end in a simpleminded series of chases and fights. There are chases and fights in “The Arrival,” but they’re generated by the story and punctuated by revelations and possibilities, so that the movie keeps thinking and doesn’t go on automatic pilot. “The Arrival” fulfills one of science fiction’s classic functions: It takes a current trend and extends it to a possible (and preferably scary) future.

If “Species” believed that aliens would be monsters (or, if you interpret the movie another way, would send monsters first to make room for themselves), then in “The Arrival” aliens are given credit for reasoning we might almost find persuasive. “We’re just finishing what you started,” says one of them to Zane, by which they mean smokestacks; auto exhausts; rain forests etc. ”What would have taken you 100 years will only take us 10.” He or it has a point.

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