CLEARLY, there is a cohort of the population that likes movies in which extra-terrestrial visitors turn up on earth. Most arrive with malign intent, seeking to occupy a planet offering better living conditions than where they’ve come from.

I find this reason challenging. We earthlings have not yet discovered the places from which they have come. That’s because either they are smarter interplanetary explorers than us, or, and I find this the more probable one, our only evidence for their existence is conjecture delivered in aggressive movies made by folk who have never actually visited their planets.

Eric Heisserer’s screenplay adapting “Story of Your Life” (by Ted Chiang) provides director Denis Villeneuve with a platform for welcoming visitors with a different reason for visiting earth. The US army engages linguistician Dr Louise Banks to explain what’s going on when a small flock of very large extra-terrestrial objects arrives in various countries, hovers a few feet off the surface and sends out heptapods who communicate by spraying out of the two extra ones (they need the other five for moving around on) a substance that coalesces into language patterns.

Can Dr Louise (Amy Adams) work out what those patterns are trying to tell us? Betcha life she can, helped by physicist and mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). The US military machine has set up a world-wide command center where Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) resists the urge so prevalent in sci-fi movies to give the order to start shooting.

It’s all deft movie fun, trying hard to look intelligent and deliver a message to us earthlings before a forecast disaster strikes (heptapods can also look ahead through time but the film doesn’t illustrate what they have found). No earthling will take harm from trying to puzzle it out. Indeed, some may even take pleasure.

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