If you want a horror movie, don't watch

Rating: 10/10 (10 March 2018)

Arrival, a science fiction movie, depicting a situation where alien beings visit multiple locations on earth for a reason previously unknown. This movie looks into different reactions that could occur to an unexpected greeting by other species from outside Earth. The protagonist of the story experiences a dream consisting of "memories" of events that she does not yet know at the beginning of the movie, foreshadowing the events that are yet to come. When these strange creatures, octopods, appear on Earth and present to the humans a language that normal people can't comprehend, the group of scientists, and even military personal, call this main character to help to comprehend their language and learn what they want. These creatures think differently than people on Earth. Their way of thinking is almost backwards from humans. They know the outcome, but don't know the inbetweens that the outcome takes, whereas we know the inbetweens, but don't know the outcome.
This movie shows many incidents of miscommunication, fear of a new species, and the destruction of one side due to a lack of communication. We see many abstract perspectives in this movie and explore the difficulties we as humans have when meeting a new species, not knowing their intentions or background. We very often judge before looking into things, which causes much more damage than there needs to be. Unlike the rest of the task force involving the octopods, the protagonist does everything she could to learn about this new species and to understand their language. In doing so, she developes the ability to think as the octapods do. She was able to see the outcomes of the actions she will make in the future and was able to maniulate this way of thinking in order to save the octapods and let the, safely leave Earth.
I really liked this movie because it brought many concepts and current problems affecting relationships, like differing perspectives, understanding one another, communication, and even tackled the popular imaginary situation of learning about the future in order to choose a better life for yourself. This imaginary concept is shown when the protagonist learns of the sad future that is held in store for her, she decides to accept it instead of changing it to a perfect situation. This movie really sparked many thought provoking questions, especially about communication and understanding between to parties. The way in which they portrayed these issues was very clever, since many people look to the skies for communicating organisms out in the universe, "waiting for us".
Many people who wrote bad reviews about this movie haven't taken the movie into a deeper level, only scraping the surface and accusing the toppings. This movie deserves much more appreciation than these people are giving it.
One of the reviews says, "my grand daughter could have drawn more convincing and frightening aliens than the highly paid special effects bods did." I think this person mistook Arrival for a horror movie because this movie obviously is one of the more realistic sci-fi movies out there. Obviously this person doesn't know anything because space is definitely not only made of scary creatures lingering in empty space. This movie was a portrayal of a more gentle species than humans and wanting to help us in order to help them. What part of help is supposed to be horror? It is really triggering how this person expects every sci-fi movie to be exactly like the one before.
At least the writer of the next review understood the part that these obviously gentle creatures weren't here to be scary and frightening, but "came to earth because they will need our help in the future so they give us the ability to 'think' like them to see time as a whole" The one thing this reviewer didn't get was that the time travel aspect of the movie was not where the movie fell apart, it was where the whole concept was glued together. In this part of the movie, she has learned to 'think' like the octapods, seeing the result before the process of her life. And this person didn't understand the reason why the octapods came to us for help. It was because unlike humans who can understand the process for an unknown outcome (our life), these octapods know the end result, but don't know how to get there, so they take things one step at a time as it comes to them.