A Thinking Person's sci-fi film

Rating: 8/10 (21 May 2017)

It would be unfair to neatly divide sci-fi cinema into mindless action flicks and intellectual futurist dramas - many movies have elements of both - but if you did make that division, Arrival would be very far into the latter category. This is, after all, a movie about a linguist learning to communicate with aliens, and if that sounds boring to you then you probably will be bored by this movie, because that's very much what you get.
But as I say, sci-fi doesn't categorize that neatly, so you also get some suspense and a good deal of deep emotional content.
I thought this movie was terrific. It is a movie that tries to create aliens who communicate in a unique, powerful way. I felt it did a pretty decent job of showing the challenges and possible ways to approach learning to communicate with an alien species (although the film acts as though linguists don't already have set protocols to learn new languages, which annoyed me).
I can understand people not liking this, because it is pretty slow moving. On the other hand, the one-star user reviews here usually raised all sorts of dumb objections that suggest they just didn't understand the movie. I'm not saying that there aren't legitimate reasons for an intelligent, thoughtful person to dislike this movie, I'm just saying that there are a lot of hostile reviews here by half-wits. So you should ignore those.
Amy Adams is excellent, the special effects are well done, the way the arrival effects the world is persuasive, and the movie is clear without spoonfeeding the audience. All in all, an excellent, thoughtful movie.