The Hateful 8 (I mean 7) out of 10

Rating: 7/10 (27 January 2017)

Arrival wasn't what I was expecting and I understand how some people are rating it as a dud, but even though it played at quite a slow pace it was still engaging throughout and reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and other similar films.
The aliens invading earth scenario was a side-show to the past/future/present life of the lead character played by Amy Adams, which was a cheap trick actually to make a sedate film seem more interesting, and only really served to give the film more punch than similarly fantastical moral-dilemma films like Tree of Life or The Fountain, which failed even more than Arrival did. Arrival was much better than those, but not a sci-fi film in the traditional sense of the word.
Arrival is, however, a film you can watch a second or third time from an entirely different perspective because of what you didn't know at the beginning or during the film itself, and with retrospect it enables you to appreciate the acting and aspects of the film you'd overlooked before.
Even with retrospect, Arrival isn't a fantastic film because there isn't enough going on and there are too many repeat build-up scenes which makes it plod, but it's still a good watch for the patient viewer who likes to think about their material after the final curtain closes.
The haters are out in force though so this review is going to get '0 out of 10 people found this useful', I suspect. Then again, I think Solaris is a wonderful film, so what do I know?