Because nothing says "TIME TRAVEL" like heavy-handed politics and children dying of Space Cancer!

Rating: 3/10 (14 November 2017)

You should not watch Arrival, because everything you need to know about the movie is right on the cover: Amy Adams staring solemnly into the distance, while Jeremy Renner gazes longingly. Oh yeah there's aliens that apparently deserve better placement than the black guy from Battleship Earth (arguably a better alien in that movie than the Cthulhu Heptapod things were in this one.)
What makes this movie terrible, and not just able to be avoided unless you need some background noise for Netflix and Chill, is that your primal lizard brain really wants to like it. The visuals are on fleek, and the score is one of those maudlin pastoral dirges that make you want to go to bed and die. Speaking of dying, Amy Adams' kid dies. That's not a spoiler because that's literally how the movie opens. Just throws it right out there on the Thanksgiving dinner table. It's gonna be a real depressing 2 hours, and don't you regret not clicking on the Avengers instead because, of course, now SHE wants to see what happens since dying children are like glue traps for millennial chicks and you're too invested at this point.
As for the rest of the synopsis, there are these aliens that come to earth in twelve of those old native American grind stones that you had to smash corn with when your 6th grade class visited that pioneer village, and they speak only in coffee stains. Swear to God you're going to watch it not believing me and then go, "Oh damn, he wasn't kidding like when he said Eleven dies in Stranger Things 2." Evidently these coffee stains allow you to see the future ONLY IF YOU ARE AMY ADAMS despite the fact that Jeremy Renner did just as much work and actually cracked the fact that the only way to save the world was to embrace this clumsy allegory for Globalism. Where's your pay gap now, ladies?
So Amy and Jeremy try to stop Forrest Whitaker from blowing up the grindstone squids despite the fact that one of the Heptapods says something in Caffeinese translates to "Use Weapon" and that's usually the time the aliens should have actually stepped back and thought, "Oh hell, that was probably a really stupid thing to choose as our first words to a militarily developed native race in whose yard we happen to be parked illegally." She eventually steals a phone and tells THE ONLY MILITARY GENERAL IN CHINA EVIDENTLY what his wife said right before she died and as they say in China, "If you can remember what my wife told me on her death bed, then I have to call off my alien war." So he tells future Amy Adams his personal phone number knowing that present day Amy Adams would then know it because when red headed white girls bust out fluent Mandarin, you suddenly learn everything about FTL Time Travel (which this claimed to be but absolutely wasn't).
Oh yeah, also also Amy Adams keeps going back and forth in time every time she reads what the aliens are saying like she's having photosensitive time-seizures. It's not confusing however, just remember that every time you see her with her kid, that part of the movie is completely vestigial to the main story and cutting it out would actually make everyone feel better.
So the aliens take Amy Adams up into their ship, and basically lay out the whole plot of the movie in subtitles because the director of this movie spent way too much time reminding everyone who watches this movie that humans are flawed, and are capable of getting sick and dying at a young age. Oh yeah, and she goes from knowing about 4 words in Coffee stain/Caffeinese/whatever to being able to carry on entire existential discussions with aliens capable of INTERPLANAR TRAVEL yet know dick about grammar and conjugation, and talk like they came from super advanced albeit somehow still REALLY into Frank Lloyd Wright squid world on a J1 Study Visa. Whole thing is just silly.
Oh yeah, and instead of deciding not to have a child so as to prevent it from suffering a horrible death, and just explain it to Jeremy Renner who will believe her because she just made the aliens go away and those people probably would know stuff like that, she voice-overs this whole thing about embracing the inevitable because as soon as Jeremy Renner admits that he loves her he also leans in and Whispers Joe Biden-style, "I want to put a baby in you", or "let's make a baby," or something super appropriate for a pre-first date phase of courtship.
And then it literally ends. And you're trying to conceal the genuine fury that Hollywood had the nerve to put a SCI-FI label on a Nicholas Sparks story. What did the aliens eat? What forms of government did they have on squid world? Why did they talk in coffee circles? what was the magic intelligent ink that they used to talk made of? can you send me the PDF on how to learn that language so I can (trigger warning) Trump my friends who brag about knowing Tolkien Elvish. These are the questions that should at least be teased with the hint of an answer if you're going to qualify as a legit science fiction film.
But no. All we learned about the aliens is they really like to see Amy Adams cry.