Amazing science fiction that trades science for emotion

Rating: 9/10 (19 April 2017)

Arrival is a methodical, lyrical, and personal science-fiction film about one woman's experience with an alien arrival. Like all great sci-fi, the film is intellectually challenging and potentially perspective-altering, and I was actually shocked by how hard the ending hit me. Unlike most other emotionally powerful films, my reaction was less about an attachment to the growth and arcs of its characters and more about the deep resonance of the film's ideas and central theme.
Arrival has been compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and to a point that holds as both films are about humankind being changed by extra- terrestrial encounters. However, artistically they couldn't be much farther apart. 2001 was technically and scientifically exacting in its attempt to tell its cold and impersonal story, while Arrival simplifies things and skimps on the details of the science in order to better service the humanity of the tale. While 2001 is without a doubt a masterpiece, Arrival may have actually meant MORE to me, even through its flaws, because Arrival - as good as it is - isn't perfect. The characters are somewhat one-note and viewers that have seen Close Encounters of the First Kind may be turned off by some of the curious choices various entities in this film make.
The story goes like this - Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a foreign languages expert sleepwalking through her daily life due to grief over the death of her daughter to a rare disease. At the start of the film, 12 alien ships arrive, hovering silently in apparently random places around the globe. Louise is recruited by the Colonel Weber (Forrest Whittaker) for the U.S. military to help translate the alien language in order to find out their purpose for coming to Earth. She's assigned to head a team being run by Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) that is set up at the base of the ship hovering within U.S. borders.
She arrives, meets the aliens, and starts to attempt to understand a creature that is wholly different from humans. Here is where Arrival starts to stand out from many other films about first contact, in that it treats the aliens as aliens. They think differently, so they are going to try to communicate differently. The rest of the movie is about how Banks learns to communicate with the aliens on the clock set by Russia and China, who get suspicious about the aliens' motives and make questionable decisions and unnecessary leaps of logic that serve the story in a McGuffinesque way.
Of course, the Chinese aren't the only ones that make curious decisions and questionable leaps of logic. I'm pretty sure the U.S. government already has a team of linguistic, biology, psychology, and astronomy experts ready to go in the event of an arrival like this, so the fate of the world doesn't rest on one egghead. Their study of the language happens on occasion with those movie leaps of logic where the realizes what the answer to some question has to be even though there are probably three or four other very plausible explanations. Banks is a bit of a Mary Sue character in this regard - she's the hero that is fighting against everyone else but is never actually wrong, and has no real flaws other than the trauma that turns out to be important to the story.
Artistically, the Arrival is mesmerizing. The score and cinematography are dreamy and disarming, and the the actors slow down to allow the film to breathe. It's actually rather amazing that both this and the far more intense film Serpico were made by the same director, and demonstrates that Villeneuve has an absolute mastery of his craft. There is nothing showy at all, no moments of true beautiful visual awe as in Close Encounters or 2001 and no signature camera angles or movements. Other than Banks, none of the the characters are not particularly fleshed out, and none of the actors has any Oscar-worthy moments of bombast. The only thing important here is the story, and Villeneuve subdues everything else to allow the ideas behind this to take center stage. It takes its time sink its teeth in us and force us to follow us to where it's leading, pacing itself and its discoveries in a way that can occasionally feel frustrating but are worth it in the end.
And oh, boy, is it ever worth it. The opinion of this movie that the viewer walks away with will largely depend on two things: how they handle the subtly flippant attitude toward actual science, and how they respond emotionally to the final act. Arrival gets at a couple pretty deep questions that I don't recall having seen in a film before - and certainly not in this way - but accepting the power of this movie requires buy-in. I sat in my seat crying - literally crying - over one of Louise's lines of voice-over near the end of the movie, and I can't imagine that line having as much power without any of the hard work - and, yes, questionable plot decisions - being a part of this film up until that point.
Would every viewer watch this movie if they knew what was going to happen in it? Maybe, maybe not. Arrival is a movie that may not be for everyone, but like all great science-fiction, it may just make you rethink how you experience the world around you.