Beautiful, although some may not see it that way

Rating: 9/10 (28 February 2017)

I'm shocked to see how much hatred there is towards this movie in the reviews section when the general rating is actually pretty good and not only on this website. Maybe this is the type of film that you either hate or you either love. I love it, so it's really hard for me to even thought about bashing it so much. What bothers me about all the bad reviews is that most of them try to destroy the film and the experience of watching it without even given true and valuable reasons of why it is in fact so "terrible". Most of the reviewers seem to have a problem with the representation of the aliens, with how long it was, how slow it was, how many holes it has. There are a lot of complaints about the inaccuracy of linguistics of people that probably have never even study linguistics. I have. I happen to have a major in linguistics. And I think is beautiful to come across a movie that deals with something so relevant to our species as it is language. Every interaction scene with the aliens felt incredibly powerful to me. Conveying a message is not just based on sharing the same semantic and lexical structures. Is about movement, expressions, is about contact, whether this could be achieved psychically or by other means. Emotional contact is extremely important in language. Those scenes were my favorites. The relevance of the moment, of giving yourself to the moment. This movie deals with fear, with confusion, with pain. But it is no a simplistic fear to the unknown, it is now a simplistic fear to get hurt. It is about us, about who we are and how we can understand that through the understanding of others. Maybe this is not a movie for people that believe science is the core of society or for people that believe in the idea of aliens with extremely advanced technology that can only come to earth to show off what they have. It's not a movie with actions sequences and spaceships flying around. And I love it, I love it precisely because of that. I guess is a movie for people that believes in love and hope as powerful entities, beyond the idea of scientific power. It's about feelings, it's about humanity. It's not perfect. I agree that secondary roles felt at times irrelevant and yes, I would have love to see more about the language and how they manage to understand these creatures. But this movie does not pretend to give an explanation to every single detail, for a lot of you that may seem as a weakness in the script, a mistake, for me, that feels like it was done on purpose. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but you know what, I rather give my own answers to those questions and feel the experience. It is an experience. It's so sad to realize that so many people didn't get that. Anyway, watch it, feel it. Enjoy it. If you don't like it, that's OK. But there is no need for the hatred. I personally describe it as a beautiful and transcendent film.