WRITTEN BY ALIENS TO MIND-CONTROL US

Rating: 1/10 (3 January 2020)

This movie is so bad that there's only one way to make sense of it: it's written by aliens who have little understanding of humans but want to put us in a trance to mind-control us. So beware of their tricks!
HYPNOSIS TECHNIQUES AND NARRATIVE DISCONNECTS
Long, pointless montages of unimportant aspects of the story with an annoying single violin playing randomly in the foreground that force a cognitive dissonance -- and we wonder, "Can this actually be important? It must be if it's emphasized like this. But it's so banal." It makes one's stomach churn like a spinning computer wheel.
A main story that is edited to leave out the most important parts, like a football broadcast that doesn't show the touchdowns or concert footage that doesn't show the band. For example, the translator's first encounter with the aliens and later her discovery of how to read the language are simply...left out. We're not supposed to notice that she simply starts to use a translation app that has magically appeared on her tablet as if the aliens got it approved on the app store.
Too much time in general spent on unimportant aspects of the main narrative, like a chef who serves up an excellent steak dinner and talks to you at length about the color of the plate. A long montage at the end of the movie that forces us to endure supposedly meaningful scenes of a close relationship that for the rest of the movie has only been terse interchanges involving work, and which becomes as impactful as watching strangers kiss in the park.
DISCONNECTED CHARACTERS
People who don't talk to each other in normal language, but use unnaturally quick, staccato remarks as if they are mind-controlled aliens themselves. Interactions in which there is nothing beautiful or even moderately functional.
A linguist who can barely speak as the main character, who spends most of the movie muttering in half-whispers.
LOGICAL DISCONNECTS
Aliens that make animal-like sounds while authorities bring in a linguist and not an an expert in animal communications, or at least someone who speaks Wookie or who has seen the whales in Star Trek IV. Kind of like a hockey team bringing in a soccer coach.
Not giving a briefing or any training to the translator, as if one's first encounter with an alien species doesn't need that. An encounter team that is forced to wear awkward, loose plastic suits when over on the next hill a ski team is wearing state-of-the-art, skin-hugging protective fabrics. Forcing the team to go to meet the aliens immediately after they receive a broad-spectrum antibacterial vaccine as if the body doesn't need the required three days to integrate the formula and develop immunity, as if it's enough to take the vaccine for show.
CONCLUSION
So overall the effect is to create a trance that puts one's mind on spin, ready to receive the embedded commands from the off-planet intruders, or makes the mind resist so much that one doesn't know whether to keep watching or run away screaming.
It's unfortunate, because the concept of the movie is good and the story introduces linguistic concepts that could have been explored more deeply.
But at least if you watch The Arrival then the horrible series Another Life will suddenly seem like a work of art.