Form over substance to the max

Rating: 3/10 (14 February 2017)

I won't try getting the score down as fast as possible so therefore 3/10, the music was quite good, although it didn't match the story. But 8.1?? For this movie?? I love going to IMDb the minute I've watched a movie I hated. And the same pattern emerges every time. You have these 10/10 reviews which read like wannabee magazine reviews and you have the 1/10 honest ones.
The 10/10 reviews are either 1. Villeneuve fanboys -"Another masterful piece"-, 2. People who want to be movie reviewers at some magazine or 3. People who are afraid they didn't get the movie and talk in clichés on how "moving" and "emotional" it was. We can't do anything about point 1 and 2. But to the point 3 people I'd like to say: Don't be afraid, there was nothing to get here. It's pretentious (just like Villeneuve's Sicario) in a way that a lot of people get distracted by form while the substance is totally lacking.
In Sicario we discover that the Americans with their war on drugs are actually a huge part of the problem. Really? Wow, that's news to me. In Arrival we're distracted by a loose connection between time, language, personal life and working together as humanity. In this movie, the Americans are the peace keepers of the world, and good old China and Russia are brainless military guys who want to blow up the poor aliens.
There's a lot of visiting the aliens and interpreting their splashy new ink language. When I heard the aliens for the first time, I'd hire some whale researcher instead of a language professor who only speaks some Chinese at most. But she deciphers the alien language in a miraculously short amount of time and understands that they're bringing some kind of knowledge, and in return we should help them in 3000 years. With what? We will never know. The male scientist doesn't help us either, he's doing really nothing but staring at computer models without getting to a conclusion so he starts staring at our female professor. Guess what happens in the end!
The music was good, but it was distracting as well. The first 30 minutes I thought something evil would happen. Maybe that was the point, but the anti-climax of the entire movie was even worse because of this.
My biggest question after reading all these IMDb comments was: Are these 10/10 comments trolls trying to boost the movie's rating? Because I just can't believe how you fill all these plot holes by yourself?