I just don't get the love

Rating: 5/10 (8 December 2016)

People are hailing this as Villeneuve's greatest, but IMHO his masterpiece is Incendies. Prisoners and Enemy are also excellent. I truly felt deeply for the characters in those earlier movies - based on those other flicks, I consider Villeneuve to be a genius.
What happened with Arrival? I don't know. Perhaps sci-fi is not his forté. Perhaps he was hampered by a book that was difficult to transform into a visual work of art. But mostly I found the movie to be embarrassingly pretentious.
There are attempts to create suspense through loud music, but they just fall flat. The alien ships are uninteresting and not particularly threatening. The movie also could have been several minutes shorter - why did that boring helicopter ride take so long? That was just one example of directorial conceit.
All the characters aside from Amy Adams are totally incidental and could be replaced by anyone - what a waste of Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker.
On the positive side - at least we see some different looking aliens, a vast improvement over the cliché tropes from the past 35 years. Amy Adams gives a sensitive and moving performance (aside from the usual screen rule for actors to have their mouths open in awe half the time, a requirement she handles better than most mouth breathers).
Overall, Arrival comes off as a sophomoric attempt to show us how we all have to work together to save our world. A necessary, noble and admirable mission, but oh my - there must be a zillion more effective and engaging ways to get that message across.