Good as a brainless sci-fi flick, but letdown if you're expecting more

Rating: 6/10 (8 January 2017)

Arrival, both in pre-release hype and in cinematic progression, builds up its viewers to expect greatness characteristic of select great mainstream 21st century directors like Christopher Nolan and Terrence Malick. At times, even, Arrival's voice overs are reminiscent of Malick's style, or its suspenseful build-up similar to that of Inception or other Nolan pieces. Yet sadly, in the end, Arrival falls far short of those expecting greater things from the movie, devolving into a cheap and corny love story and a complex problem resolved by a silly temporal paradox rather than a more thoughtful/complex solution. The acting quality helps ground this movie in some regards, with good performances from Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner (Forest Whittaker's role is okay, but his fluctuant, sometimes present, sometimes absent accent is a faint scar on a movie supposedly hinging on language and linguistics). If you can release your mind entirely to accept total fluidity of time, then the resolution of the movie - "past Amy Adams" at a discrete time learning the solution to the "Chinese problem" from "future Amy Adams" - then the plot resolution may be at least plausible, but even then it seems horribly cheap and unsatisfactory as a solution for such a complex matter as preventing war with aliens. Moreover, from a language and linguistics perspective, the movie is similarly disappointing, creating what is touted as an immensely complex alien language that - while represented by different symbols that we are familiar with (much like Chinese or Sanskrit, for example), is in fact no more complex in meaning than the languages of Earth (it perhaps has even less depth of language than the massive vocabulary of classical Chinese). And while I, as a former language and linguistics major, correspond to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language directly influences the way an individual thinks (of course, in far more words than this), the idea that Amy Adams learns to read the future from a mere few months of exposure to an alien language - which she at that time still barely understands - is such a bastardization of this hypothesis that it really does the hypothesis intellectual harm. Long story short, if you plan to watch this movie, watch it as a sci-fi flick...expecting more, particularly on an intellectual level, will leave you sorely disappointed.