Arrival is like Contact

Rating: 6/10 (11 January 2017)

This movie Arrival has the feeling of Contact because both movies have a main character that is a middle aged female. In both movies there are a lot of flashbacks and memories and an interplay between now, past and future. The dark oval shaped space crafts looked like the Evil eye in Lord of the Rings, Mordor. And I thought this movie had elements of ET - like the way the base camp was set up and the plastic like uniforms the team had to wear when visiting the alien creatures. At first I thought this was a pretty original idea for a movie, but when I watched the movie further, I noticed that so many Hollywood movies had already experimented and displayed almost all of the parts of the science fiction story line and plot. Mixing in components of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I guess it costs the directors and film sponsors lots of money to make a movie like this, a couple of million, and the movie needs to be a success in order for it to break even financially. I can sense that Arrival stayed within the status quo of what a Hollywood audience would consider safe. It did not come up with anything evil or scary instead it stayed within the comfort-level of the general film population. What I would have liked to have seen is some brand new original ideas regarding aliens, and the idea that these aliens have a different technique of writing is not different enough in my mind. To me, it means that aliens and humans are more the same then different in their ways of thinking, communicating and processing information. A more original idea would have been something along the lines of a non-verbal but pure sensory communication. Something that could not be data analyzed within the house-hold computer.