This soup needs more salt, and more soup. Contains spoilers!

Rating: 1/10 (3 January 2017)

Despite the almost universal appreciation of Arrival as a smart and thought-provoking sci-fi film, actual scientists and hardcore nerds will find it clumsy and lightweight. The plot seems deliberately unscientific, from the non-taxonomic name given by scientists to the aliens, to the lack of biologists in any of the assigned teams (!!!), it becomes clear that the writers put science to one side, and concentrated on the fiction, rehashing first-contact plots from great films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Signs, The Abyss and Contact (they are all shamelessly plundered in Arrival!)
Adams' turn as linguist Dr. Banks is up to her typically high standard, but against the improbable and sanguine plot, her character flounders. The concept that she alone, among hundreds of scientists, could initiate communication just by her skills as a linguist is farcical. All other scientists are portrayed as clueless, terrified idiots. Renner, as a theoretical scientist of an undisclosed and apparently useless field provides some much needed mirth, but his character contributes nothing to the plot save some future DNA.
But Arrival really falls apart for sci-fi fans as soon as it is revealed that the aliens experience non-linear time, and pass the technique of doing so on to Dr. Banks. At this juncture an inquiring mind should consider the magnitude of the concept of a creature that can exist in non-linear time - they are essentially omniscient and immortal, being able to access any point in their lifetime at will. They can also change their past and future, essentially being able to create parallel universes at will. Banks proves that this is the case by accessing information from General Chang's wife, suggesting that Banks can access her past and change it (she previously did not have the info on Chang's wife's dying words, at least not in the linear time-going-forward presentation of the movie). With the power of time travel and multiverse-hopping at her fingertips, surely Banks would teach the technique to her future daughter, allowing her to never have to access the part of their lives where she dies of cancer and Banks' life falls apart. Why would Banks persist in re-living her tragic future instead of changing her past and living a parallel life in a parallel universe? Sentimentality over her daughter would likely become less significant once Banks had simultaneously lived a billion different lives with a billion different daughters in parallel universes. Perhaps that dehumanization would have been a good subject to focus on - we might see Banks allowed to change her tragic future, but deciding to keep it. But that didn't happen in this film.
Banks would also have had these abilities for her whole life, not just from the moment (in linear time) that the aliens arrive. Thus she would have been aware of their language and writing without all that torturous study and work. The aliens, whatever their agenda in visiting Earth in the 21st Century, would also have known that Banks would be their contact, so why send eleven other ships across the globe, terrifying the planet and risking war? And why did it take so long for them to start 'writing' and communicating with the US team? The potential sci-fi generated from the concept of non-linear time is genuinely mind-blowing, and is not even touched-on in Arrival. The movie relies on the emotional subplot of Banks' 'future' memories and undisclosed 'future' relationship with Donnelly (Renner) - but the alien visit and subsequent time-skipping-ability don't provide a very interesting counterpoint to this.
Essentially this is a story about a woman dealing with the tragic death of her daughter... oh yeah, then some aliens help her to save the world from the Chinese. Look back to the movie 'Signs' - similar concept, a family struggling to come to terms with the death of the mother amid an alien invasion. In Signs, the invasion scenario drives the plot forward, allowing the characters to develop and an interesting story arc to grow. In Arrival the contact scenario nearly starts and then stops a war, but has little impact on the characters other than the omniscience thing, which is rather wasted on visual rhymes and whimsical sentimentality. Arrival is vapid sci-fi, and there's a place for that in cinema, but when the plot (and marketing) of a film hangs on the science of linguistics, concepts of time and existence and is delivered with full-force tepid brown- graded realism - that science better be excellent. In my view, the Jurassic Park homage during the helicopter scene was a disservice to a film with a superior vapid sci-fi concept.