Whew, are linguists that fast?

Rating: 6/10 (6 June 2018)

Arrival, not to be confused with the 1996 Sheen vehicle "The Arrival" (also an SF film) is an honest attempt to rise above the typical SF action film or even SF drama, and it succeeds in many places.
My problem is just that, as a physicist and someone who speaks 5 languages (but is NOT a linguist by any means), the middle stretches of this film were vaguely unconvincing. So you'll learn a language in a few weeks (or months?) by scribbling abstract words on a white board? You're not even going to start by pointing at reference objects? And mysteriously, you become fluent in no time to the point where you master supra-temporal perception based on language?
Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned a la Shakespeare's "A rose is a rose by any other name," and unconvinced that learning a weird new circular language will suddenly make you clairvoyant? Language is powerful, but not that powerful. In the end, words are words, and ink circles are ink circles.
The film tries hard to be intellectual, and does not fall far short of it either, so I enjoyed it overall. It's just that I was constantly asking myself "Really?" and that sort of interfered with my suspense of disbelief, which any great film has to succeed at. It all felt a little bit too forcÃ©. So a generous 6 it is.