Fantastic but not a 10

Rating: 8/10 (24 February 2017)

I really loved this film. It has an emotional impact that is rare in SF films these days. Contrast this with the awful "Passengers" and you can see how big of swing there is in writing quality in this genre.
Others have written eloquently on the quality of the music, cinematography, acting, story, and direction. I can't add anymore to those accolades.
*** SPOILERS FOLLOW ****
But here are a few reasons why it is only an 8 in my book.
1. This is not quite as good as Interstellar or Inception, which are the 10-star gold standard by which I measure other modern SF films).
Why?
a.) The score for Arrival is quite good but it is not of the Hans Zimmer caliber we hear in Interstellar or Inception. b.) The story, while very strong, still has a bit of the clichéd "Get your act together humans and work together or else" kind of feel. The Nolan films were completely unique and free of clichéd SF story lines.
2. The flashback editing is, in many places, a cheat. The entire film is actually a flashback starting from just a few minutes in but once in the main flashback time-line there are combinations of flash-forwards and flashback. It's easiest to visualize the time-lines as "Now" at the opening and closing of the movie with flashbacks from that time-line being the scenes where Hannah and Louise are having conversations about this and that. Meanwhile, the main story-line of dealing with aliens is actually a flashback at least 25 years in the past from the "Now" where the movie begins and ends. In that time-line the narrative is continuously interrupted by flashbacks from the "Now" time-line and then eventually we begin to see flash-forwards from the 25 year in the past time-line of the Arrival of the aliens.
Some fans of Arrival categorize all the flashbacks from the "Now" time-line as actually being the "memories of future events" (flash-forwards from the 25 year in the past time-line) and I tend to think that this is because the director makes very little visual distinction between what is a flash- back and what is a "future memory" flash-forward.
We eventually DO see Louise having flash-forward memories late in the film after her brain is "rewired" by the alien language. This is purposefully (and I think unnecessarily) confusing for the viewer. The flashbacks of Louise's interactions with Hannah start long before Louise meets the aliens and they are much more obviously flashbacks from the opening "Now" time-line.
It is only much later in the film that we begin to realize that the director is inter-cutting FLASH-FORWARDS (e.g. Louise has a premonition of a girl with a caterpillar, poking a stick into a creek, picking up a stone, etc.). In those scenes we sense that Louise is only getting fuzzy glimpses of future events - which are completely different from the crystal clear conversations such as we have seen earlier in the film (discussions of "win/win" term definitions, drawings by the young Hannah, why daddy left mommy, etc.). By mixing narrative flashbacks, intended as clues for the viewer (and not something that Louise is actually experiencing as future memories) it muddies the narrative - probably on purpose - to keep the viewer off-balance. Villeneuve could have, for example, made the future memory sequences desaturated and diffuse to make it obvious that they were different from the flashbacks. He chose not to hence, why I think it's a cheat.
3. There was never enough sense that Louise's study of the language was beginning to rewire her brain, as was implied that different languages might. Although we see the fruits of her labor, we never get a sense sense that Louise is living, eating, breathing, and dreaming in the heptapod language prior to starting to see the future (the aforementioned glimpses of the girl with the caterpillar and the stone in the creek). This would have helped us buy that she would eventually start having premonitions about the future.
I completely agree with other fans that the film is a thinking-person's movie and enjoyable for many reasons, not the least of which is because the twist, if you can call it that, is not sudden but a slowly dawning one.
What I think I most enjoyed about the ending is that it is so bitter sweet. The heroine is successful in one way but meets with profound sadness in another. She unites the world but ends up alone in the end.
BONUS CONJECTURE:
Learning a language that allows you to see glimpses of your own future would probably cause a human to go insane. What is now and what is in the future would become intermingled leaving the person who learned the language, a quivering shell of a human being.
The Heptapods know this. It is their weapon for conquering earth. They teach one very smart human who then deploys the weapon in the classroom and in a book (as we see happen at the end of the film). Engaged and intelligent humans learn the alien language and then slowly begin to go insane as they all start seeing their own future. This leaves only dolts and morons who could never learn the language, as the remaining population. Much easier to occupy a planet of idiot sheep than one composed of a certain percentage of thinking individuals who might fight back
Discuss.