One of my all time favorites.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Usually a bad movie is either boring or stupid. This flick manages to connect a bridge between the two, accomplishing what only a select few bad movies have done before. Congrats, Villeneuve. If I used to be 99% sure I'll never watch your awful Blade Runner "sequel", now I am 100% sure of it.These "superior aliens" are so inept and disorganized that they didn't even have the basic common sense to first LEARN an Earth language - ANY language (Swahili if need be) - BEFORE landing with 12 egg-shaped hover-crafts on Earth, scaring the bejesus out of everyone. Surely these "superior" aliens (let's call them squiddies) are smart enough to realize that Earthlings are deeply divided, paranoid, dumb and easily frightened. No? Well, in that case the squiddies are daft too, and that means the whole movie falls apart because its fundamental premise of a superior alien race doesn't hold water. Speaking of water, they look like octopus. OK, fine: better than skinny bug-eyed big-headed generic anal-probing Area 51 type of green lizards, but hardly original or menacing or interesting. And the squiddies fire black ink too: what is this, a comedy? Is the fact they're octopussies the reason why they got along so well with girl-power girl?I commend the film for not making this yet another absurd U.S.-centric invasion flick in which only Americans make decisions, where EVERYTHING revolves around the White House. Admittedly, Americans save the day - again - but at least it's not JUST about the Americans. But the way the movie goes about making this a global invasion is just embarrassing; it's pedestrian, utterly unrealistic. In essence, the best minds in TWELVE (read: 12) countries are working on this mystery, and yet the ONLY person who makes any significant progress is a linguist professor at some rinky-dink U.S. college where 5 kids show up to class. And when she finally makes a large breakthrough, those same government hotshots who trusted her and hired her aren't that interested in what she's got to say. Really? The film is trying to tell me that China and Russia are so trigger-happy that they can hardly wait to attack a species that is so advanced that humans couldn't even figure out how they communicate between their 12 ships. Humans couldn't even figure out what the ships were made of! Yet they wanted to nuke them. WITHOUT being attacked first. It's so idiotic, you need be a fan of "Armageddon" to believe any of this malarkey.The film is somewhat "serious" science-wise - at least until the story turns all stephenkingsian on us by unloading a huge psychic turdcake under our collective noses. Suddenly Louise reads the future! Why? How? Why her? What about the Russian and Chinese counterparts? Was the Sudanese girl-power linguist expert not competent enough to learn this "time language"? Did the Pakistani girl-power linguist not try hard enough? Was she a lot less smart? Lazier? What?... Sure, whatever. It's Hollywood 2016 i.e. it has to be dumb.Louise's sudden psychic powers are explained by her learning this "time language". Her theory that learning a language changes how you think was far-fetched enough as it is, but acceptable. They had to go a step further, however, and introduce this ludicrous premise that there is a language that makes you... see the future? I know this is sci-fi (well... soppy chick-flick sci-fi) but this is just too silly.I also struggle with this laughable idea that aliens come here just to give us a puzzle to solve."We came here to help you, BUT you have to first solve an incredibly difficult puzzle. Failure to solve it could have disastrous consequences and actually ruin you more than help you, but we are willing to take that chance because we love playing around funny guessing games involving ink with inferior clowns such as yourself."By the time the movie had already spent HALF-AN-HOUR on humans trying to communicate with squiddies, I was getting impatient, figuring "well, the film's gotta move on soon, can't be possibly ALL about this linguistic riddle nonsense". Oh yes, it can! The entire movie is about this puzzle-solving drivel and those boring meetings between the romantic couple and squiddies! Nothing else. In fact, there are 37 of these meetings and I'm just thankful that Villeneuve decided to show us "only" 6-7 of those. (Feels like 15-20, but that's just me.)The "future flashbacks" concerning her daughter are so very boring, mushy and visually flat, I wanted to fast-forward them: they look like shampoo commercials. In fact, my finger was nervously circling the FF button during the entire movie. I felt like I'd spent an entire day watching this dreary nonsense.Get this: Louise has a child with lover-boy DESPITE knowing her daughter will die in her teens!!! Kinda defeats the whole purpose of HAVING premonition, doesn't it? "Well, done, girl-power girl! You have obtained the power to see the future. Now feel free to not use it by not avoiding major mistakes such as giving birth to faulty kids". Un-be-lieveable. Some people actually find this TOUCHING, INSPIRING even. Say what? Obviously people who agree with her decision don't have children of their own.I also have to mention how unconvincing and dumb the notion of a benevolent alien race is. Look, I like octopussies as much as the next person, but the idea that a superior alien race is this NICE to us for no real reason than because they have great etiquette and a perfect moral compass, is asinine. It is actually possible to make movies with goody aliens, but it's very difficult to make them convincing and intelligent.The incessant MUMBLING of the entire cast doesn't help either. These thespians hadn't even learned to SPEAK, yet they'd been cast in a big-budget film about a linguistic expert trying to solve a language riddle. Kind of ironic.

Arrival has an interesting premise. Aliens arrive to planet Earth in 12 different spacecrafts with a mysterious mission, and in the US (which is of course the only location that matters in this film), linguist Louise Banks is brought aboard to decipher their language. Meanwhile, Louise seems to be having increasingly intense flashbacks about her daughter who died and husband who left her.I'm not sure if the filmmakers thought linguistics were too difficult for the audience to understand, or if they didn't really understand them either, but apart from a few key moments, the process Louise goes through to learn the aliens' language is vague and opaque. We don't know exactly how she does it, but a montage later, and suddenly she can speak to them in full sentences. How did we go from concrete, observable language (e.g. walk) to being able to communicate abstract concepts (e.g. purpose)? That part is glossed over entirely. It's still an interesting concept, and the circular way in which the aliens write holds an symbolic purpose, but it's not executed as well as it could be.While all of this is going on, there are scenes showing world affairs in response to the aliens (called heptapods). The filmmakers made a decision to involve no real-world political figures in the movie, which was probably for the best, but still manages to be distracting. It's all "the president" this, "the president" that, and a fictional Chinese general now seems to be leader of the entire Eastern world. News segments come across as corny and forced, as does a fictional rightwing conspiracy theorist. Of course, it's the Eastern world that decides to wage war on the heptapods, those unenlightened brutes, and Louise alone has the power to stop them. This all provides the only context and main conflict of the movie, but it is rather dull and contrived.Then there's the "flashbacks" and romance, which are interlinked. Early on, Louise is introduced to physicist Ian Donnelly, who comes across as arrogant, and the two spar a bit. Then they clearly begin to grow on one another. It's a very cliche, albeit subdued (remember, this is a serious film!), romance plot. Ian makes a throwaway line about how language informs our experience of reality (i.e., the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), which ends up being the key to the whole movie. There's also a key "flashback" in which Louise tells her daughter her father is a scientist. While it's all pretty vague, the circular nature of the aliens' language, combined with the fact that Louise has come to think in their language, starts to make it clear that these aren't "flashbacks." Ian is her husband, and their daughter dies; because Louise has been given the gift of the heptapods' language, she now sees time as they do, i.e., nonlinearly. Instead of being stuck at a point in time like all humans, she can now see every event in her life unfold. It's a confusing concept, and the film doesn't do much to clarify it.This all is used to solve the problem with that pesky warmongering General Shang, who gives her his phone number during one of her visions and directs her on what she can say to change his mind (which makes it even more ambiguous how time works in this movie--is having a nonlinear perception of time the same thing as being clairvoyant?). Then the heptapods leave, and Louise finally understands the gift they have given to her. Is it a gift? A thoughtful audience will have more questions than answers. Louise continues on with her life, marrying Ian and giving birth to their daughter, because "it's the journey, not the destination" (as the cliche goes). She knows Ian will leave her and her daughter, and then the daughter will die from cancer at a young age. Is it really ethical to give birth to someone who will suffer and die at a young age? As deep as it wants to be, the movie doesn't trouble itself with such questions. It's also not clear if Louise has any free will to stop it--after all, the events she sees are already happening (the nonlinear view of time negates the idea of a separate past, present, and future). Does Louise have any free will at all?Arrival is a well-made film from a technical standpoint. The cinematography and soundtrack are excellent. The plot has a lot of potential, and there are some interesting moments therein. However, in the end it doesn't add up to the sum of its parts. Its rather slow, light on detail, and the ending manages to be both predictable and confusing. The ending tries to spin Louise's "gift" as a positive, but it's hard to buy it.

It's a scathing indictment of Humanity's primal survival instincts and how they inherently begin to work against us, contained within a story that forces the mind to do just the opposite: remain vulnerable. I love it. Those who dislike this movie are, in a sense, exactly the ones that it calls out: those with preconceptions with which they are unable to part.

This movie was great. At first I thought it would be a cheap mix of the "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and "Sphere". This movie was so much more. I went into this movie with low expectations which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. In all, this movie had a plot twist that was more beautiful than plot ruining.I know a movie is great when I am driving to work the next day (1 hr commute) and I can't stop thinking about it.This movie is free on Hulu, if you have not seen it yet, please do so