Starts off slow, slows down abit in the middle, and literally crawls on its hands and knees over the finishing line.

Rating: 1/10 (7 April 2017)

A friend of mine told me not to bother watching this. However, being a sci-fi fan I was pretty sure that 'Arrival' would be right up my street.
It really wasn't.
The most frustrating thing about this movie wasn't necessarily that it was awful, but that it takes a concept like first contact with an Alien civilisation, pretends to make a serious sci-fi flick and then basically fills the reel with fluff, incompetence, over-dramatisation, and apart from the main character, a load of incomprehensible, bumbling buffoons.
I'm quite a fan of bad movies but I can't think of one that I've seen that made me want it to end with 45 minutes left.
And here I was thinking that Interstellar was a load of tripe that would take some beating. Yet here comes another sci-fi flick that again pretends to be a lot deeper than it really is with customary nods here and there to 2001.
Newsflash: 2001 was made in 68 and still kicks movies like Arrival and Interstellar mercilessly.
No way does this awful flick deserve an 8.0.
Edit Nov 2019: Just rewatched Arrival 2 and a half years later to see if I had it wrong the first time I watched it. Nope. Arrival still sucks.