This Arrival Promo Will Make you cry

This new promo Paramount Pictures put together for Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is brilliant. The film's conceit is that a dozen alien ships have touched down all across the globe and it's up to linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and an elite team of investigators to try and decode their language and figure out a way to communicate with them before the world breaks out into a global war. Villeneuve is going for something beyond your usual alien attack film, putting him more in league with Steven Spielberg's Close Enouncters of the Third Kind than Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and we're excited about this. The notion that it's not some hot shot fighter pilot or military general who stands between mankind and some catastrophic disaster but a linguistics professor is a brilliant notion. So is a film based around an attempt to communicate with , rather than annilhate, an alien race.

Which brings us to this moving promo. Paramount took people from all across the world and paired them in groups of two, with the caveat being they had to speak different languages and therefore be unable to communicate with words. This leads them to drawing, acting, and other clever work arounds in order to explain to each other who they are, and what they've been through. The effect is surprisingly moving, and perfectly in tune with a film that is putting the emotional intelligence back in sci-fi. 

Arrival touches down on November 11.