Original and true refreshment in this genre.

Rating: 9/10 (14 October 2017)

Sharp and Short
At first, I was afraid that we are going to see something that we've already saw, only in a different way. That was the reason why it took me a few months to convince myself to watch this movie. But when I watched it, I was pleasantly surprised.
Arrival is a story which brings a new perspective of potential relation between people and creatures from outer space and that is what makes this movie unique and special. It starts when twelve mysterious spacecrafts appear around the world. Every similarity with other look alike movies ends here. Two main characters are Louise Banks, linguistics professor, and Ian Donnelly, scientist, physics specialist. They are trying to communicate with aliens in order to find out a reason for their landing. The way in which they try to do this is something we've never seen in such films. It includes mutual learning of languages. Louise and Ian tried to describe words to aliens so the aliens can show them the same words on their language. This turned out to be a very good plan. This, combined with Louise's ability to see future (which is very difficult to find out until the end), makes Arrival so special. It was a real pleasure to watch it. We were used to more or less same stories in this movie genre which almost always for the main theme have a war with aliens. Arrival brings new, original approach, which I think should be priority if similar things happen in real life.
I have to leave some room for praises for cinematography. Bradford Young alongside director David Villeneuve did a great job. This is not a surprise because Sicario and Prisoners, two other very good Villeneuve's movies, also have great cinematography, when Roger Deakins did excellent job. Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker were good, although there was a room for better performances. In some critical parts, they looked slightly indifferent, but we have to have in mind that their parts weren't easy, especially Amy's. Sound editing (movie won an Oscar for this category) film editing, screenplay and lots of other things deserve special praise. All of that, brought one Oscar win and several Oscar nominations. Denis Villeneuve has one more excellent movie to add to his biography.
Excellent!