"Arrival" brings us a creative, but dull and inconsequential story.

Rating: 5/10 (11 November 2016)

When a movie is such that its genre is difficult to nail down, the combination of words used to describe what kind of movie it is are significant. There is a difference between a crime drama and a crime thriller, and between an action fantasy and an adventure fantasy, and between a horror thriller and just plain horror. The difference is usually a matter of focus and emphasis. So, when you go on IMDb.com and see "Arrival" (PG-13, 1:56) categorized as "Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi", you can be sure that distinguishes it from, say, the "Star Trek" films, most of which are listed as "Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi". "Arrival" is one of those movies that's hard to pigeon-hole. If it helps, I'll tell you that I see this film as 20% "Independence Day", 50% "Contact", 10% "It's a Wonderful Life" and about 20% other movies which I can't mention in this review without spoiling the movie's twists and reveals even if they are kind of predictable.
"Arrival" centers around Dr. Louise Banks (multiple Oscar nominee Amy Adams), a brilliant linguistics professor at an unnamed university. The film opens with a montage of Louise as a single mother raising an intelligent and creative daughter who ends up tragically taken by an unnamed disease before reaching adulthood (not a spoiler, because this all happens in the film's first five minutes and is used mainly as character development). These scenes show Louise to be a doting mother, who is devastated by her daughter's premature death and has an understandably difficult time getting on with her life.
When 12 huge objects which look like filled-in canoes arrive from outer space and park themselves vertically just above the surface of the earth in seemingly random and mostly remote locations all around the globe, people panic, riot and wonder. These things are just sitting there, not doing anything. The militaries which protect the countries where these objects are hovering discover that every 18 hours, a door opens at the bottom of each space ship, allowing humans to enter and attempt to communicate with the 7-legged, octopus-like beings which "speak" in seemingly random sounds.
Army Colonel Weber (Oscar winner Forest Whitaker), who is in charge of the site around a ship floating over the state of Montana, comes to the office of Dr. Banks (who had previously done some translation for the military and still holds a Top Secret clearance) to enlist her help. Louis is paired with theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (multiple Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner) and, within hours, the two of them are accompanying Col. Weber and several military technicians into the Montana ship every ¾ of a day, interacting with two large septapods (as they label them) floating in a cloud behind a transparent wall.
The process of communication goes frustratingly slowly. After Louis and Ian decide to remove their protective suits (so the aliens can better "see" them), the septapods begin communicating by spraying onto the barrier an ink-like substance that forms circles with different combinations and configurations of bumps and swirls on the outside of each. Louise and Ian painstakingly figure out the meaning of these circles and how to use the heptapods' written language to find out why they came to earth. Meanwhile, U.S. military and political leaders, whose concerns are voiced by an on-site C.I.A. representative, Agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), are growing impatient, while international military officers, following the lead of China's General Shang (Tzi Ma), are pushing for decisive action.
"Arrival" offers up an original and very human, but rather dull sci-fi story. It's more intellectual than action-packed in nature and doesn't need battle scenes or imminent threats to the survival of mankind to make its point, but it could've used a more engaging plot. The movie ends up being not much more than a 2-hour sermon about embracing life with all of its ups and downs, which isn't enough to justify the film's long, slow build. Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer (adapting Ted Chiang's multiple award-winning 1998 novella "Story of Your Life") arrive at the moral of the story in a way that's creative and memorable (and the cast is outstanding), but the journey is too tedious. "B-"