A load of old codswallop

Rating: 6/10 (16 November 2016)

"Arrival" arrives garlanded with a lot of critical praise. Why, I ask myself since Denis Villeneuve's latest is fundamentally a load of old codswallop but with pretensions. It's certainly entertaining; Villeneuve is, if nothing else, a consummate professional but surely the comparisons with Kubrick and Tarkovsky are not only misplaced but insulting to two much finer filmmakers. A more likely companion piece is Robert Zemeckis' "Contact", (they both share a strong heroine), down to the sentimentality surrounding life, birth and, naturally, death. It's also full of gobbledygook about language that might not endear it to a multiplex crowd. Given that they have virtually nothing to do but look puzzled Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whittaker aren't half bad. The aliens themselves look like giant octopi putting this more in the category of the monster flics that America produced in the fifties rather than what appeared post-2001. Reasonably enjoyable then but hardly Oscar material.