** ½
out of ****
I'd
heard so much about “Arrival” before I went to see it that I knew
I would have to be careful not to get my expectations too high.
Everything I'd read suggested that this was a highly intelligent film
that would challenge you and didn't make any attempt to be
“Hollywood”. Now right off the top I can say that I understand
why people are writing such things, but they've all left out that it's
also very slow moving and offers a payoff that really isn't quite
worth the wait.
Amy
Adams is Dr. Louise Banks, a renowned and highly respected linguist
with a history as a translator for the US Government. When 12 huge
alien crafts, dubbed “shells” by the media due to their shape,
arrive in varied locations all over the world the government contacts
her to come try to communicate with the aliens. The shells are in
many different countries, all of whom seem to be trying to do their
own thing to communicate with them, so the government sees it as a
race to be able to talk with the aliens.
Banks,
along with theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), seems
to be making slow but steady progress in her communications, no small
feat considering the aliens communicate solely through visual images they
secrete in smoke. The progress she makes isn't enough for the military, who
appear to feel that whichever country is able to talk to the aliens
first will be rewarded with a weapon that would give them terrible
power over the other nations of the world. The other teams
communicating with the shells feel similarly, believing the aliens
are trying to set the nations of the Earth against each other, and
the film becomes a race to confirm or disprove this idea before the
army tries to destroy the shell.
Where
all of the standard critics are saying this is “thinking man's
sci-fi” and that it expresses interesting ideas that will get
people talking, I have to admit I just don't see it. The film poses
the government and military in their familiar role of “shoot first
ask questions later”, with
the scientists as the heroes trying to save the day, both of which are pretty standard sci-fi themes. "Arrival" gets into
some semi-interesting time/space ideas at the end, but though they're
delivered in a way we haven't seen before, I'm not sure that makes
the whole thing unique or especially great.
I've
given the movie two and a half stars, which may not be fair to it as it
is overall a pretty enjoyable film, if the slow-moving parts don't
leave you too cold. But they left me pretty cold, and since the
marketing of the film has had a tremendous amount to do with its “Rotten
Tomatoes” rating (currently around 94%) they're pretty much begging
you to look at it as a critical wonderkind. And to be frank, I just
don't think it is. It's a solid, not-particularly-exciting piece of
work that, unlike the really great sci-fi films, didn't leave me with
any feeling that I needed to see it a second time.
