Giant floating bananas disconcert the Chinese

Rating: 3/10 (13 May 2017)

The banana is the most remarkable of fruits. Not only was it explicitly designed by Jehovah Himself for the health and pleasure of higher primates, the banana has contributed more to comedy than any other member of the Plant Kingdom. For example, who can forget this classic schtick —
BURLESQUE SHOWGIRL: Why do you have a banana in your ear?
BAGGY-PANTS COMIC: Eh?
BURLESQUE SHOWGIRL: (shouting) Why do you have a banana in your ear??
BAGGY-PANTS COMIC: You'll have to speak louder, I have a banana in my ear.
And of course, there are all those wonderful banana-precipitated pratfalls performed by every farceur since Charlie Chaplin. But alas, in spite of the banana's inherent jocose propensity, the gargantuan gravity-defying interstellar bananas that are the star attractions of this film elicit not a single titter, let alone a full-throated chortle. This is unfortunate because "Arrival" must be some kind of absurdist comedy. Otherwise, how does one account for the backstory sequence serving as the film's frontispiece which centers on the most laughably sentimental demise since Little Nell kicked the bucket? It's pretty much downhill from there with precious few yucks to ward off the encroaching ennui.
All joking aside science fiction is a tough genre that Hollywood routinely fails to pull off. Offhand I can think of but two that entirely met expectations: the brilliant 1950's B-picture "It Came from Outer Space" and Stanley Kubrick's enigmatic masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey". These films are relevant in context since they both address the theme employed by "Arrival", specifically Man's first encounter with an off-world intelligence.
"It Came from Outer Space", faithfully based on a story by the remarkable Ray Bradbury, deals with a visitation by creatures that, though as physically alien as cheap 1950's special effects can realize, reason by a logic not dissimilar to our own. Crash-landed on a planet inhabited by well-armed and violence-prone primitives the aliens execute a reasonable yet desperate plan of escape. Through the aid of a human astronomer, they manage to repair their spaceship and depart, leaving the scientist longing for their eventual return. Kubrick took the opposite tack in his magnum opus. His aliens are apparently incomprehensible, yet they are definitely purposeful. They no sooner land on Earth, or more precisely their machine does, then they commence to execute their plan, which is the manipulation of the evolution of just another undistinguished root-munching anthropoid into an ingenious predator for purposes they keep strictly to themselves.
It is reasonable to assume that one or the other situation will apply if and when real aliens make contact — either we shall understand them or we won't, but in any case, their visit will be purposeful. ET isn't going to cross the galaxy just to sit in its starship and idly twiddle its appendages as the banana-nauts of "Arrival" spend much of movie doing, or more precisely NOT doing. Not doing stuff is much of what happens, or not happens, in "Arrival", which makes an inquisitive mind wonder what the popcorn one failed to buy when first traversing the lobby tastes like. And speaking of appendages this movie's aliens have tentacles. Yet more galactic squidoids... yeah.