Arrival disappoints due to a poor plot and an anticlimactic ending

Rating: 5/10 (14 November 2016)

While this film has a good musical score it is weakened by its use of cliché sci-fi themes, a flawed plot, and an anti-climatic ending. This movie uses very cliché sci-fi themes. For instance, the idea of alien space ships orbiting or hovering over the earth occurs in many other well-known and recent sc-fi movies like Independence day, oblivion, the day the earth stood still, etc. Also, these space-ships just arriving out of thin air shows a lack of creativity by the film producers.
One of the major flaws of this film is that the main actress starts having flashbacks of her dying child. She has these flashbacks before even encountering the aliens. However, towards the end of the movie we discover that these flashbacks are actually flashforwards. However, if she was having these flashforwards about someone she does not know, she would have a very definite reaction to these experiences. The fact that she has these experiences without any sort of reaction should indicate she is hallucinating, probably due to a hallucinogenic drug. Any normal person who has numerous visions of someone they do not even know would have some sort of reaction and ask himself or herself "who is this strange person I am having a vision of?," but the actress does not react in such a way, which is quite absurd. It's like she's so dumb she actually thinks to herself, "oh cool look at all these memories of a daughter I didn't know I had." In short, the film's use of these flashbacks/flashforwards was nonsensical, was a poorly thought out way to add emotional significance to the film, and undermined the coherence of the movie plot.
The whole time-travel idea in this film is very problematic. If she has a vision of herself in the future speaking to the Chinese General and asking him what she is supposed to say in that moment and what his phone number is, then that makes no sense. If the General gives her his phone number in the future, which she uses in the past, it would make the upcoming future the past and the current past the upcoming future, because we are to believe that receiving information in the future is informing the past. Thus, the whole time directionality used in this film is confusing.
Another major flaw of this film is that it would be unlikely for an Army Colonel to seek assistance from a civilian interpreter when the military already employs interpreters. To assume that the military does not employ highly skilled military and civilian interpreters is preposterous. Moreover, numerous DoD agencies employ interpreters. It is thus doubtful that the military would seek an interpreter who has occasionally worked with the military or DoD where there are numerous interpreters who are fully employed by these organizations.
The ending of this film was very anticlimactic. It was a serious letdown when the Chinese General decides to just withdraw his forces and the alien ships disappear. At least let a few missiles out. Throw some grenades. Launch a nuke or two. There was absolutely no action in this film, which was disappointing.
The best part of this film was the musical score. I liked the music. Also another positive in this film is that the aliens are not bipedal, because aliens are always bipedal in pretty much every other sci-fi alien film. I'm glad the aliens in this film have a lot more legs to stand on.
I also found the fact that the aliens were able to expel some sort of dye to communicate quite interesting. I'm not quite sure if it was more like a fart or something else though.