One of Villeneuve's best films!

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2016)

"Arrival" is based on the short story written by Ted Chiang, which is about a linguistic called Louise bank, who's hired by the army to communicate with aliens, that have landed on earth in these so called cocons.
The movie was one of my most anticipated movies of the year, because of one reason: Denis Villeneuve. I've seen nearly every movie of him, and the ones I haven't seen, I'll probably see in the near future. He is an amazing director, who pays attention to everything he brings into frame, and everything he brings into frame has some kind of meaning. In this movie that's also the case. Not as much as in "Enemy" for example, but it's there. At a certain point I thought the movie was going to be like "Enemy", because of one scene, but after all this movie wasn't as complicated. More on that later in my second to last paragraph (There'll be spoilers). He also, just like in the rest of his movies (e.g. Sicario, Prisoners), succeeds at building up tension. The scenes where Louise is trying to communicate with the aliens were always kind of tenseful, because you don't know how they're going to react. The cinematography I found to be gorgeous. The scenery, use of focus and lighting were all perfect. The use of focus was something that really caught my eye. It gave scenes a more dreamlike feel, when it had to, which kind of helped me to unravel the twist at the end. At those scenes focus was overused, but it worked. Those scenes also contained more close-ups to show the emotion of the actors, which made everything more effective. The use of colour was also handled well, which only made the gorgeous looking shots, look even more gorgeous. I found it to be a shame that Roger Deakins wasn't the cameraman for this film, but Bradford Young surprised me by doing something nearly as good. Young really captured the reveal scene of the spaceship very well. I think that that was one of my favorite scenes. The soundtrack in the background, the mist waving over the mountains, the camera movement. Everything was there to make the scene fantastic, and it was. The soundtrack was original and fitted the movie well. The CGI I found to be good at times but during one scene it didn't really live up to what the movie had showed previously. The ship and aliens themselves looked good, but there's one scene, I can't talk about due to spoilers, which didn't look good.
The acting was absolutely fantastic. Amy Adams gives again a wonderful performance. She gives depth to her character and you could really see the emotion on her face. You could see what she was feeling, due to the visual story telling of Villeneuve. There were a lot of scenes, where she just had to act, without saying a single word and we knew what was going on inside her head, because of Amy Adams wonderful acting. I really hope she gets an Oscar-nod for this performance, because it really blew me away. Her character was very interesting, but more on that in the next paragraph. Jeremy Renner also gave a fantastic performance. His performance was less spectacular than the one of Amy Adams.
SPOILERS FROM HERE.
The screenplay should also deserve an Oscar-nod for best adapted screenplay. The story was told in a weird – but good - way, whereby you get to care for the character of Louise. This was done by showing her memories of the future, mixed in with the stuff that's going on right now. This was such a creative way to build up a character that I was amazed by it. In those memories they used the focus heavily, like I've said before. The character of Louise really got fleshed out very well. The rest of the characters didn't really get the same treatment, but that's something very normal and something you shouldn't complain about, because Louise is after all the main character. I've also hear people say that Jeremy Renner's character is useless, and with that too I'll have to disagree. He indirectly helped with the character building of Louise and did also do some things himself to progress the story, so I don't see why he would be useless. Now something about the twist. Louise can see in the future. I found the twist to be kind of unexpected. I was kind of expecting some kind of answer in that direction, but not the answer we got. It was creative and something new. Due to a particular scene I was expecting something more complicated, because the twist gets explained fairly well. This scene was also the one that reminded me of "Enemy" and this was the one where Louise sees the alien in the corner. It reminded me of the giant spider in "Enemy", and because of that I was expecting a movie that you really have to think about to get. That's not entirely the case with this movie. It does make you think, but not in the way that "Enemy" does. This one makes you think about humankind and how we react in situations like these. We would just attack them, and that our society just doesn't accept different. It also makes you think about the concept of time and time loops. I loved the fact that the movie makes you think about these things, because that's when you know you've seen a good movie: when it makes you think about it, and not necessarily the things they show in the movie, but the questions it brings up. The dialogue is also very good, but at the end there's just one line that felt out of place. But that's really the only critique I have on that.
That's all I can say due to the word limit. In the end this was one of Villeneuve's best movies. 10/10