Not for everyone, but definitely for me.

Rating: 9/10 (13 February 2018)

Ambiguous, serious, thoughtful - this film may be slow-paced, but at no point was I bored. In my view, the science was mostly plausible; the fact that it wasn't entirely plausible was made up for, in my opinion, by the uniqueness of the ideas dealt with in the film, when compared to others of similar genre. As some other reviews say, this film is about aliens, but it is also about language, communication and the incredible differences in perception that could exist between different species. I think this last point could be explored even further than is done so in the film.
At the time of writing, Arrival has an Amazon rating of 3.5 stars - I'm used to filtering through things to watch based on their rating, so this almost slipped my view. I'm glad it didn't. I'm now reconsidering the weighting I place on average ratings - a director who is brave enough to do something different will tend to get quite a few low ratings as well as high ones, just by virtue of the experimental nature of their work. (In this regard, I see parallels to Blade Runner: 2049, which I saw before Arrival, and was actually quite a fan of, although I like Arrival even better.)