Arrival Left Me Frustrated

Rating: 7/10 (27 November 2016)

2016 has been an awful year, in both the cinematic realm and the real-life one. With virtually no above average blockbusters released save for 'Civil War' and the second 'Conjuring' movie, I hoped that one of the first mainstream movies designed for the upcoming awards season would provide a respite from this year of idiocy. It did, but not to the extent I had hoped it would.
The first act of this film is, quite simply, exceptional. Denis Villeneuve plays up the mystery and tension of this scenario - which in many ways resembles the first act of Independence Day - to levels of true excellence. We do not get a proper glimpse of one of these alien crafts until the moment our protagonist Dr. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) sees one first-hand, at which point we are treated to a wonderfully composed long shot of the bizarrely shaped vessel levitating above a green, mountainous expanse of land as a truly haunting leitmotif for the alien presence plays. Subsequent scenes expertly maintain the tension by staging the first occasion Banks boards the ship, joined by theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner), with near Kubrickian precision and pacing. The 2001 parallels are inescapable here, and indeed very welcome, as such an occasion as this can only rightly be played for every moment it's worth.
The second act then rolls in and turns the movie into a puzzle story, as our heroes try to figure out exactly for what the aliens are intending to do on Earth. It's arguably the 'funnest' section of the movie, and it is certainly the most interesting. At this time of increasing divisions, people trying to figure out how to successfully communicate with someone else seems like a very prescient story to tell. The trailers have already spoilt their initial answer, but I will not. What I will say is that it rather rightly has the people of the Earth perturbed, although I still insist the reactions of many of the world's governments to the answer was frankly schizophrenic. Still, a solid second act that proceeds an exceptional start.
But then the third act begins, and the screenwriter rather inexplicably develops a seething contempt for his audience. Up until this point, we have been treated to flashbacks of Banks' past traumatic experiences with a child who died of cancer and a vicious divorce that followed soon after. They were not particularly well-directed scenes, and I felt their presence as shorthand for character depth only succeeded at lessening the film. Well, certain revelations occur about the nature of the aliens' language that, shall we say, cast these scenes in a different light, and with that the film suddenly explores a concept that I had not anticipated that it would explore at all, nor really wanted it to, upon entering the cinema. This is a spoil-free review, so I won't tell you what it is. I will give you a hint, though; Christopher Nolan covered it rather recently, and it is a concept that is infamous for allowing characters to be quite literally handed the solutions, having done almost nothing to earn them.
I applaud the film for dealing with this concept in this particular way, and hope it will interest people in exploring the theory behind it, but this intellectual adventurism comes at the considerable cost of narrative tension and plausibility.
I loved so much of this film, but by its end, it had let me down, and I cannot give it anymore than 7/10 for that grave sin.