THE ARRIVAL

PLOT SUMMARY

Zane Zimanski is a radio astronomer — one of the gung-ho sort who's eager to receive ET's message. He does receive a signal, apparently of ET origin; but he can't confirm it. Worse luck: his grant is about to run out. He goes to Phil Gordian, his boss at JPL, to plead for more. But Gordian gives him the song and dance about budget cuts and says the signal was probably from a terrestrial source anyway, "like last time." Still, Zane has the tape. He gives it to Gordian to analyze.

We next see Zane working as a home satellite dish installer. One day he gets an idea: phased array! He can rewire many of those home dishes into one that is effectively as big as the radio astronomy dish he was using. He goes on a rewiring marathon and sets up a control station in his attic. While he's monitoring the network late at night, he hears a noise at the window. It's Kiki, the little neighbor boy. Startled, Kiki falls into a tree where Zane finds him hanging by his feet. The kid mouths off to Zane, who initially leaves him hanging there, but then relents and lets him watch while explaining the work.

Sure enough, a signal identical to the first shortly booms in. But this one appears to come from Earth — in fact from a Mexican AM radio station whose call sign the announcer gives as XMRRR.1

Another plot thread has Ilana Green, a climatologist, puzzled by flowers she finds growing in the Arctic tundra. She too finds no support: promised data on greenhouse gases are not available due to a failure in a NASA satellite, and no one will tell her the launch date of the scheduled replacement satellite. But she calls in favors from friends, and finds out that the highest concentrations of GHGs are in central Mexico and several other third-world countries. Incredibly, over the past 5 years, the concentration of GHGs has gone up 700% in those limited areas. She has a friend run a simulation. If the increases continue unchanged, Earth's mean temperature will rise by 12°C in a decade, bringing catastrophe for human civilization. She heads to Mexico to investigate.

She and Zane meet there, only partly by chance; they have pursued separate lines of evidence that lead to the same place. Ilana is killed, but Zane stumbles into the heart of the mystery — and what a mystery it is! Then he escapes to confront Gordian again. Gordian gives him the key to foil the conspiracy, but he, his girl friend Char, and Kiki have to go through a lot in order to use it.

Capsule review: The Arrival is outstandingly inventive in its premises while staying mostly true to the science of radio astronomy. It also develops the effort to suppress Zane's discoveries in chillingly sinister ways. The sets are awesome; the special effects are clever and never overdone. The end result is one fine, absorbing science-fiction mystery film.