Does not live up to the hype

Rating: 6/10 (16 November 2016)

Unfortunately Arrival does not live up to the extreme hype. From the critics ratings you would believe that it's the 21st century Citizen Kane or Godfather. It isn't. While I did not dislike the movie, it is enjoyable enough; but saying this movie is better than Interstellar let alone Contact is way off the mark. My wait for a very good science fiction movie since Interstellar and ex-machina goes on.
The premise of the movie is about communicating with another vastly different species, akin to us communicating with ants, as an example is certainly an intriguing premise; but the premise to me was not profound enough to have me thinking about it after leaving the cinema, it wasn't even enough to keep me engaged in the movie for the entire length of the film.
To me really good science fiction is not really that much about the characters. For example, I don't consider star wars to be science fiction and Star trek to a lesser extent, because they are character driven stories, whereas science fiction it's about the environment, and a particular concept that acts on the characters and is bigger than the characters. The star of the show for Interstellar is the concept of "interstellar-travel" and the implications of faster than light travel. The star of the show for Contact is the concept of humans coming into "contact" with an alien species in modern times. But really the intriguing part about contact is the realism of the contact. You can imagine people really acting and reacting like that to such an extra- ordinary event. The main focus isn't Ellie(Jodie Foster's character).
Arrival does not work, like the aforementioned movies, because the movie is too character focused because the premise is really not intriguing enough to hold together an entire movie. Whereas in "Contact" deciphering the communication with the aliens was just "a part" of the whole, not the entire premise. Not only that, the tension was literally manufactured. The deciphering of the alien language was not exciting enough, it turned out to be these circle ink-blots. Okay, so what. What other incites of the universe or philosophy are we gathering from this? And the tension was completely manufactured. Because Contact was right. Any communication with a sentient intelligent species while it would take time, it would be based on the universal language of science and mathematics. 1+1 is always equal to 2. Any alien that shares this universe with us, is under the same laws of physics, therefore such statements will always be true. Even if you talked to primitive humans, you can easily grunt and point to fire and say "hot" and they would understand what you're talking about.
What that means is that establishing communication cannot be the entire premise of the movie.