This movie presents a real conundrum for me.  I love science-fiction and Arrival is the best kind of sci-fi, an intellectual invasion tale with smart people attempting to make contact with a truly mysterious species before our human capacity for self-destruction kicks in and ruins everything.  It has top-notch actors, strong special effects and a storyline that seriously considers how first contact would occur, and how tricky a situation it would be.  Why then am I disappointed in this film?  Because it has the emotional appeal of a boring college lecture.

Denis Villenueve’s movie is so much of an intellectual exercise that it forgets to involve the audience in the sheer wonder of the situation.  None of the main characters, scientists and Army types all, have much of a reaction to the visitation of Earth by twelve huge semi-conical spacecraft.  Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguist recruited for the communication effort, has the most visible reaction: she trembles.  No raised voices, cries of fear or alarm, jumps for joy or tears of wonder are ever seen or heard, at all, throughout the whole story; this just isn’t realistic.  Scientists and Army types are people, too, but they rarely ever act that way.

That isn’t to say that emotion is absent; television screens show how the world’s populace largely reacts to the aliens’ arrival, which sparks worldwide panic and alarm.  While the scientists and Army types calmly go about their job in the middle of Montana the stock market plunges, religious cults flourish and destroy themselves, people march in the streets and the world prepares for The End.  That’s fair, and probably true enough, but it also became a clichéd perspective half a century ago.

Ultimately the plot becomes too intellectual, I think.  It plays with time in such a way that undermines everything we believe, and we must simply accept as real the fact that the scientists finally do communicate with the aliens, because it certainly isn’t visibly convincing.  It’s as if the movie is saying that only the world’s top brains are worthy of understanding the aliens, and even then barely so, because the movie makes no real effort to invite the audience into the conversation — even while the aliens would seem to be happier conversing with ordinary humans.

My favorite movie is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which shares a similar structure to Arrival.  But where Steven Spielberg’s film humanizes the hypothetical experience of first contact, Villenueve’s film not only avoids humanization (until the penultimate scene when Dr. Banks meets them face to face) but contends that emotion has no place in the equation.  I disagree, and I believe the film suffers greatly from this omission.  Arrival is a good film, but it certainly is not satisfying.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  14 November 2016.