What? No!

Rating: 5/10 (26 December 2016)

Lets starts honest
I really liked Arrival. Until it turned weird. Then, not so much anymore.
With a class A cast including Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker this should have been a great movie all the way to the end. Except that it wasn't. It was a great movie until it stopped being that. I had high hopes for it and as such I was left slightly disappointed.
Arrival is a good story with a ton of potential for greatness until it got whacked on the head and it all went belly up. For some reason I can't help comparing it to the 1997 movie Contact, starring the iconic Jodie Foster, which kind of had the same problem. Great movie with a great story until the moment it went all pear shaped.
The Story
Twelve pods of unknown makeup and origin have appeared overnight at seemingly random locations around the globe. As to be expected the media goes nuts and social services break down. School is out. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a successful linguistics professor who stands in from of an empty class room the next day. She highly regarded in her field and has done highly classified consultancy work for the government in the past. Because of this it comes as no big surprise when she gets approached by the military. They need her help in decoding the language of the aliens and once that is done they want her to establish communications with the visitors. For this mission she gets a team of people and works closely together with Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist, portrayed by Jeremy Renner.
All twelve pods have positioned themselves at seemingly arbitrary coordinates all over the world. The local governments are scrambling to establish contact with the aliens and try to learn as much as they can about 'their' pods. They all have a fall out about how to proceed and one by one they end up shutting down communication with the rest of the world. Everyone is now acting isolated without knowing what the others are doing or how far they are with their work to decipher the purpose of the visit. This of course creates an explosive situation that threatens to get out of hand when gossip has it that the Chinese are contemplating to nuke their pod in search for answers. This of course is not an ideal situation for anyone, as no one knows if and how the aliens or the neighbours, for that matter, will retaliate.
Here is where it went wrong
In between her work Louise has these strange flashbacks to her family, mainly her daughter. Except that we learn she doesn't have a family nor a daughter. These flashbacks are just that, but that the events have not actually happened yet. They will happen in the future. And that, because she now speaks the aliens language, time doesn't follow in a straight line for her anymore but in parallel strings all mixed up.
Say what?
This is where is turned south for me. I am good with weird and strange. But that was too much for me. In that moment the movie lost its credibility in my eyes. I know there are concepts out there about time and space and astro physics. In fact I am very interest in the subject. I have read several read books and listened to countless podcasts about it. But the way it was done in the movie is just ridiculous. I am very sorry.
Final thoughts
I suppose we can draw similarities to today's society, which is rather trigger happy. We constantly on the cusp of a global catastrophe even without the presence of aliens. This raises the question of what will it take for humankind to step back from the abyss. What is needed for people to start working together instead of against each other?
Arrival also touches on another question. A moral one that people ask themselves daily. If you knew the future and the way your life would turn out to be, would you change anything? If you knew that by accepting the greatest gift and joy you would ever get, you would also set yourself up the the most desperate pain. Would you still chose the same path?
Its a powerful message. I just wish they would have found a different way to convey it.