Sci-Fi !?

Rating: 4/10 (17 January 2017)

Hollywood needs new ideas or new writers - Arrival is a kind of a mix of Gravity (heroine lost her only child, personal drama) and Interstellar (writers mess up with space and time) and what we mainly get is Amy Adams trying to talk to aliens (wasn't there something called Childhood's End!?) and almost no action at all but at least a couple of aliens (who reminded me a little like those ones in Monsters). But to be honest every Agathe Christie movie has me more captivated in solving the puzzle (of the crime) or watching an Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot in doing so as our heroes in Arrival trying to decipher the messages of the aliens.
Arrival is sci-fi of the kind that is more about a political correct agenda (don't fear the alien, this ingredient they took from District 9) as real sci-fi or even entertainment - I would prefer almost every sci-fi B-movie from the 50s with laser guns and stuff to this one who tries to be something like 2001 but fails heavy like Interstellar. To put it simply - the writers of Arrival are not in the league of Phillip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov and the like. This is "sci-fi" for the political correct audience (almost no violence and in the end all humans wonderously get into some human-world-brotherhood, as if all the conflicts and crimes just would disappear because of some aliens arrival) and like p.c it is: mostly boring. On top some of the talk about the difficulties to talk to aliens is almost zero science or at least only on a very basic level which everyone with some brains could tell you without studying anything. Alone the assumption of our heroes, that the aliens don't expect that the first of all questions of the humans to them will be something like "what do you want or what do you intend to do?" is so dumb - I mean those guys know humans have had no contact to other "outsiders" before and they travel the space so they are not dumb like apes - they will approach humans like apes and will know what kind of confusion etc. they had produced with their landings. And the regular cliché that the U.S. military or CIA or whatever organization of the government has no own specialists regarding communication with foreign cultures etc. is super-dumb. Another p.c. stuff: almost every movie nowadays has a woman as hero to save the world or to boss around etc. pp., I just wait for the first African-American transgender woman to save or conquer the world or Ethan Hunt returns after an operation as a woman ;)
But the worst is that the makers of Arrival have imo forgotten the main reason why you make movies: entertainment. And no, I don't need action to be entertained, I watched Polanskis Carnage and I was Extremely entertained without one explosion or shot done. All the real classics and masterpieces of sci-fi like 1984, Dark Star, Logans Run, Soylent Green and the many others raise big questions in science and philosophy etc. but they also ENTERTAIN great.
Arrival is everything but big in entertaining - e.g. Oblivion with Cruise is a masterpiece compared to Arrival. This I say with a heavy heart because I especially like Amy Adams as an actress (this is one positive aspect of the movie, her performance ofc is good). What else left to say!? I just hope that in the next movie of Ridleys Alien-saga the aliens and humans don't have something like cuddly or encounter groups to solve their "communication" problems :D
Note: If I would be a producer or writer I would make a persiflage-movie about the p.c.-movment with a hero like an African-American homosexual transgender of Jewish origin who is mentally challenged and sits in a wheelchair but is the best and most lethal special commando of the USA (with Trump as President) - the story would be executed in the tradition of Naked Gun with a good shot of Rambo brutality.