Slow-moving but interesting

Rating: 7/10 (26 May 2017)

Visually impressive, "Arrival" follows a linguist's attempts to communicate with cryptic aliens against a backdrop of growing military-industrial paranoia. The acting and the overall look of the film is very good but it's a bit heavy-handed in its "why can we all get along?" message – which seems to be the 'message du jour' in Hollywood these days. I am not a linguist and have no aptitude for languages, but I found most of what Amy Adams' character says about the challenges and potential pitfalls in translating obvious and simplistic, suggesting that we're to believe that the military/CIA/government, who seem to have problems with this concept, must be pretty stupid. In general, I didn't find the early 'translating' scenes, which are central to the plot, very imaginative or convincing (compared to, for example, Stanley Weinbaum's 1934 short story "A Martian Odyssey"), nor did I find Adam's behaviour, such as removing her protective gear so the aliens could see her, very believable. The movie has been called a 'thinking person's science-fiction movie but don't 'think' about it too much, it's not nearly as clever it seems to think it is and it falls into the usual time-travel paradox problems. Overall, I liked "Arrival" but seem to be one of the rare middle-of-the-roaders as this movie seems to inspire love or hate (at least on IMDb).