Either you'll like the surprise twist or you won't

Rating: 6/10 (30 November 2016)

Arrival reminds me of a long episode of The Outer Limits. You're plunged into an exotic and mysterious science fiction scenario. You know the outcome all depends on a "big reveal" that will come almost at the very end of the story, and you will judge it based on how cool that reveal turns out to be. I wasn't as impressed as I was hoping to be.
I admired the style and the imagery of the film. I enjoy nearly all scifi and I particularly enjoyed this director's previous big movie, Sicario, about the drug war in the Southwest and Mexico. However, I was unexpectedly bored most of the time while I was watching this one. For one thing, as is true of most hard scifi scripts, the majority of ordinary humans are dismissed as hysterics or religious zealots. That left me cold. Any movie that casts Forest Whitaker, no matter how many awards he has, is going to make me wish all of his scenes had subtitles as a hurriedly mumbles through all his lines. Finally, the whole "the world as we know it will melt down into an apocalyptic disaster unless our hero gets this right" is almost always an unconvincing crisis. I never felt like anyone was really in the kind of imminent danger the author wanted me to feel, so all there was to do was admire the scenery and the occasional special effect. The story needed more characters, more tension between them, and more interesting and less predictable dialog. Nice try.