Mysterious and suspenseful

Rating: Null/10 (25 January 2017)

This film tells the story of a linguistic professor and a theoretical physicist, who are tasked to communicate with the aliens who have landed on Earth. They enter the alien spaceship, and undergoes the painstaking deciphering of a unprecedented visual language.
"Arrival" is quite a fresh film because the plot revolves heavily around linguistics, which is a rare topic for a film. The alien language looks simplistic but beautiful, a proof of the statement "less is more". The plot is suspenseful as no one, including the characters and the viewers, know what is happening. The apparent mystery is compounded by the apparent flashbacks of Dr Banks' life. The story is slow at the beginning, but is super rapid towards the final minutes of the film. It took me quite a while to work out what happened at the end, and indeed the purpose of the alien visit.