Hollywood CAN do good Science Fiction after all.

Rating: 10/10 (10 February 2017)

After the last big Sci-Fi movie with a lot of hype around it, i almost lost hope i would ever see Hollywood master the genre. Interstellar was big, flashy, bombastic, but terrible Science Fiction.
Big chunky robots with CRT-monitors in their belly extending their blocky arms to handle the joystick of a spacecraft: It was exemplary of Hollywood's total incompetence when it came to Science Fiction.
Now comes Arrival, and it does everything oh so right, that i expected to go oh so wrong once again.
The movie sacrifices none of the human element a big production needs, but excels at a premise that does not require writers struggling to understand Machine Intelligence or actors losing themselves in techno-babble.
The star for once, and this is Arrival's greatest trick, is not the computer, not the scientist, but... a linguist.
While so many other movies failed ultimately exploring the world, the technology they propose, Arrival faces no such struggle because the scenario is now, the alien elements truly alien, not human-made, and the star something writers feel much more at home with: Language.
This movie demonstrates how self-aware the makers were of the trouble Science Fiction was in, and elegantly solves the classic Hollywood problems with a brilliant script.
Note needs to be made of two more things:
First, the visual design of spaceships and aliens. Not revolutionary in idea, but so clean and haunting in execution, every shot exactly as it must be, that these invaders will stay in memory for some time to come.
Secondly, the lead actress, Amy Adams. At no point does she appear a superhuman hero destined to save the world (although she quite definitely is). The subtle ways she manages to show fear and flaws deserves recognition.
Arrival is the best science fiction to come out of Hollywood in some time, and i could not be more glad at how positively the genre was boosted by this achievement.