Ersatz intellectual sci-fi that thinks it's deeper than it is

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2016)

On paper, I should have loved this film. Slow-paced sci-fi with little Blockbuster action, based around well-drawn human characters... what's not to love? Well, first the good. The acting is excellent, the cinematography is great, the dialogue is good too. It's a very well executed piece of film-making in many regards, and will be loved by many cinema goers.
However, the film has one big problem.
The essential component of any good "soft" science fiction story is that it allows us to examine the human condition in novel ways. Through the use of allegory, we can take apart our real-world behaviour and examine it in a new light. District 9 does this, Moon does this, 2001 A Space Odyssey does this (though you have to read the book to see it properly), and Ex-Machina does it particularly well. This film fails completely.
Arrival presents one very big ethical dilemma (which I won't reveal) and then dismisses it pretty much out of hand, failing to address the real emotional challenge and the genuine moral conundrum it poses. Worse than this, it ducks the dilemma by invoking gender stereotypes - women are unable to face hard decisions and will passively sacrifice themselves to their soft, fluffy feelings and end up going with what was meant to be, while men will react to any difficult situation with anger and stone-walling to the point of damaging their relationships because, you know, that's what men do. There is no challenge to this behaviour, no revelation that it doesn't have to be this way, no attempt to suggest that actually women can make the hard choices or that men can have a deeply compassionate side that reaches beyond the "me man, me protect". The characters do not take a personal journey, and do not learn anything about themselves at all.
Given the main character is a woman and that her relationship with her male companion is so integral to the piece, it was extremely disappointing to have what should have been the core of the film treated with so little consideration and given so little screen-time and so little gravitas. It's as though someone put a red pen through the most interesting and important scenes (I have not read the original story, so this is quite possibly what happened), or some film exec saw how well Interstallar was received and thought "yeah, lets find us another one of those" and grabbed the first clever-looking sci-fi script that crossed his path.
There has been comparison with some of the great sci-fi movies of the past. This film is no-where near as ground breaking in terms of its ideas or as rich in terms of the depth of its characters as those classics. It does not challenge us, it gives us the same old clichés and is more interested in the big reveal and the cleverness of its premise than the implications of these things. The film lacks authenticity, preferring to dazzle us with its assumed smarts than address the difficult questions. The irony is that if the exact same story had been told in the form of a Blockbuster, it would have been much more fun without losing out on any of the ideas! Disappointingly, only 6/10.