flawed film still worth seeing

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2017)

I went into this film expecting something along the lines of Contact meets Close Encounters meets Independence Day, and instead found something very different. Now that I've seen it, the film it reminds me of most is Sixth Sense, where the last few minutes entirely re-maps what you think you've just seen. Arrival has plenty of flaws-- the Jeremy Renner character is woefully underdeveloped (and what exactly does his team DO?), the Forrest Whitaker character doesn't seem to serve much purpose, and as many other reviewers have noted, the method used to learn to communicate with the aliens is just silly--although to give them a little bit of credit, they do give the impression that what we are shown is only the tip of the iceberg of the round-the-clock work that was going on.
But if you can let all that go, this film isn't really about aliens at all. It's a meditation on grief and pain and the limitations of human knowledge. If you knew how much pain was in your future, could you bear to face it? If you knew how something would end, would you still go through it? It's heartbreakingly poignant.
Also want to add that I am not much of an Amy Adams fan, primarily (and oddly) because of her lightweight voice. It suited the princess role in Enchanted perfectly, but in every other role I've seen her in since, she's seemed miscast. So I was not expecting to appreciate her in this film. But by the end she had won me over. I can't think of another actress who could have played this role.
So, yeah, it's flawed. There are tank-sized plot holes (as there were in Sixth Sense), and either they ignored huge swaths of what would really happen in an alien invasion, or (to give the film-makers the benefit of the doubt) they chose to leave that stuff off-screen. But it's still worth seeing: fabulous mood-building, solid acting, great soundtrack, thought-provoking and touching story.