A tad over-rated

Rating: 6/10 (29 March 2018)

The state of Montana is one of twelve places in the world where alien aircrafts have landed. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a renowned linguist who is recruited to study and interpret the language used by the aliens. She is assisted by a renowned scientist played by Jeremy Renner.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" will likely always be the benchmark for this genre (UFOs, alien landings). "Arrival" is a competent film with fine moments but it doesn't feel engaging enough to fill its almost two hours. Indeed, the acting is good and the story is interesting though maybe a bit far-fetched. It also seems to borrow from "Gravity" in which the heroine has a similar difficult past.
The photography of this film is usually in dark tones. The interior scenes always have different levels of darkness. The outdoors scenes are mostly night-time, nightfall, just before dawn, or overcast days. The choice of maintaining darkness is interesting but after a while, it tends to keep the viewer at a distance.
SPOILER ALERT
Well, it's sort of a spoiler. After the release of "The Martian" last year, someone astutely pointed out that that film and "Gravity" were big-budget Hollywood sci-fi films that involved international co-operation, especially from China, in the rescue attempts. This good image of China seemed to be a way to draw Chinese film-goers to the movie. In "Arrival", when it became apparent that China was, yet again, involved in an international effort, it was easy to predict one of the outcomes.