First Contact! Close Encounters with Clichés

Rating: 1/10 (26 November 2016)

'Arrival' begins well, but ends up a major disappointment after twelve huge egg-shaped spacecraft arrive on Earth and hover a few feet above the ground at various locations around the globe. Initially it takes a novel approach - instead of ray-gun battles, the world's finest linguists are corralled by national authorities to enable communication with the aliens, who resemble an octopus/elephant hybrid. Each host country competes to unravel the Octophant language, selfishly hoping to acquire advantages over rival nations. Unfortunately the meetings between extraterrestrials and linguists aboard the vessels quickly become repetitive, thereby squelching any sense of awe over humanity's first contact with intelligent life from beyond our solar system. This loss of dramatic tension becomes a serious problem as 'Arrival's' plucky heroine struggles to decipher the aliens' complex circular hieroglyphics.
The actors' performances are more than adequate for the material, but the narrative arc becomes increasingly predictable. As the story unfolds, it leans stubbornly upon the old Sci-Fi cliché of mankind's paranoia and xenophobia. The Earthbound military powers foolishly adopt a threatening attitude toward the ETs, who obviously possess more advanced technologies. The screenwriters deploy some equally foolish plot devices as the film charges headlong into a formulaic Hollywood cliff-hanger climax, before it winds up wallowing in sentimental hokum.