Dead on Arrival

Rating: 6/10 (28 November 2016)

It's fitting, I think, that the main action of Arrival takes place on a barren Montana plain, because while pleasant looking in it's own nondescript way, the film itself is flat, empty, and mostly devoid of complex life. To begin with the highlights, Adams and Renner give frankly admirable turns in the roles they are given, and to go a step further Adams may well have salvaged what could have otherwise been a dull and forgettable part, one of a legion of 'approachably smart' tragic geniuses that movies and TV can't seem to get enough of. Whitaker and Stuhlbarg, unfortunately, are not afforded enough screen-time or overall thought to distinguish them from their narrative roles, and are given no chance to shine through the thick soggy blankets they've been written under.
Arrival is a film that asks many questions and then proceeds to forget about most of them, to instead answer a set of completely different questions. If its title, its synopses, and the entirety of its marketing campaign had given off a general impression that the mystery at its center in any way concerned aliens and that the unraveling of this mystery would be its thesis, this impression is not well founded in the film itself. To save a reader the price of a ticket, the sum of what is learned of the aliens and the path taken to discover it, ergo the majority of the film's runtime, is simply not very interesting.
The special effects, while serviceable, are not good enough on close inspection to be a selling point in their own right. The CGI would not look out of place in 2006, the designs are too grey and familiar to hold one's attention, and the film is too sedentary with its fantastical elements to qualify as a visual spectacle.
The characters for the most part are flat archetypes, such that were it not devoid of all humor, one could be forgiven in mistaking Arrival for a Roland Emmerich movie. The framing and interactions are practically paint-by-numbers; brilliant liberal arts professor and her encyclopedic recitation of internet listicles, the self- superior yet hunky scientist, and the the gruff colonel who exists merely to have things explained to him on the audience's behalf and to provide a false sense of conflict whenever he disagrees with the protagonists for no good reason. The characters are at best nothing new, and together with the dialogue, I was put more in mind of a low-grade CBS procedural than the thought-provoking cinematic experience this film was evidently trying to be.
Of course this is all driven moot by the film's ending, in which the audience member is slowly given to realize that the preceding ninety minutes was nothing but a plot device within an almost entirely unrelated personal drama. At it's heart, this, although I won't spoil what it is, is what the movie is actually about. The aliens are nearly inconsequential to this. The film is perfectly content to let the Aliens simply be aliens and explores them or the implications of what they are or do no further, beyond their relationship to this. I would feel cheated at the anti-climax if I weren't impressed at the movies bamboozling of my expectations. The weight of the reveal, which I take no shame in dwelling on as it's the only necessary part of the movie, hit me with its brunt right as the credits rolled, leaving me somewhat slack-jawed. Unfortunately whatever profundity the movie had re- earned at this point did nothing to assuage the tedium of a second viewing, and so I cannot earnestly recommend one.
The true concept behind Arrival, which again I will not spoil here, is an intriguing one, but a full length feature film was not the right the medium in which to explore it. I will not discourage anyone from seeing the movie, it boasts a few solid performances and isn't at all an unpleasant time sink for an evening out or an empty afternoon, I will sum up my feelings to say that Arrival is harmless entertainment that is too conventional for its own good and makes poor use of its ideas.