Well-crafted and executed

Rating: 10/10 (11 February 2017)

As often happens, I feel at pains to respond to all the negative reviews I'm reading here...
I should first point out that I read the Ted Chiang book that contains the source short story this movie was based upon. The book comes highly recommended, and Chiang doesn't consider himself a science fiction writer.
All the elements in the movie are almost exactly the same as in the book. I say this, so as to highlight what some deem as poor alien design. It's always a tricky thing to pull off, especially since there are no confirmed sightings of actual aliens. In my mind, anything goes, but in this case the Heptapods were on the page before the screenplay was written.
Again, the dialog, "Do you want to make a baby?" is straight from the book. It's explained that this comes after two years of marriage, so it's not intended as a lame pickup line.
Someone even had issue with a lack of apparent government involvement. Seriously, do we need another movie with the president making all the actual decisions on screen. Government interaction is implied by means of common sense. We really don't need to see what 11 governments are up to directly. That would be boring.
I guess these things were lost in the movie. I tend to enjoy movies that leave some of the story unexplained in detail. Books get away with this with prose and narration, and movies often don't have enough screen time to go into the same level of detail. I tend to turn off my common sense radar for movies like this. First and foremost, it's intended to be entertainment. And, if you're busy sighing and complaining about these elements, you're missing the point of the story.