My Review of "Arrival"

Arrival is a science fiction movie that came out back in 2016. Denis Villeneuve was an up an coming director hot off the heels of the smash hit Sicario. I absolutely loved Sicario so I had to see this movie right away. I was blown away when I first saw it so I was hotly anticipating to this rewatch.

The movie centers around an alien arrival. There are a bunch of UFO's that just suddenly appeared in different parts of the Earth. We can't really figure out any logic in the manner in which they placed their floating aircrafts.

We get introduced to main protagonist Louise. She's a linguistics expert and one of the best in the business. The military wants her to help the figure out what these aliens are saying. That's easier said than done. This movie uses a lot of aspects of language to explain Louise's motivations and actions.

As we all know a lot of what we say is explained through inflection of the voice or body language. There's a lot that can be misunderstood because a lot of our words have many different meanings. All of these aspects of language kind of give me this Christopher Nolan kind of feel to the movie. They make a lot of explanations and as a person who tries to study other languages these facts hold true but put to the extreme.

As Louise works with the aliens to understand each other tensions flare around the world. This is portrayed quite realistically as we can see a lot of the situations actually predicting events in the real world 4 years after this movie was released with the pandemic. Good communication as is patience are quite important aspects of social living in this world and unfortunately the world doesn't have a lot of it. Countries are threatening war with these aliens as well as militant civilians. Miscommunication, fear and mistrust run rampant and it's very believable.

Louise's time with the aliens will be cut short because of these tensions and we're all put under the pressure cooker as well while we're watching her struggle. While all this is happening she's having visions of things and she doesn't know why. All is revealed later on in the movie.

For a movie focused on science they did a remarkable job in breathing life into the aliens. We can't understand them yet they somehow have some sort of humanistic quality to them. This movie also dives into Louise's story and it's not very linear. She jumps timelines (another reason why I say it parallels Nolan films) in her life.

Louise's self exploration is another side story to this movie that's pretty interesting as well. It's kind of a mystery that we're trying to solve as we go along. With multiple viewings you can see how they had sprinkled the seeds for the audience to figure it out for themselves. Obviously if you know the answer everything is so simple but when I first watched this it was quite a revelation.

There isn't a lot of wild action or special effects in this movie. The special effects are quite dated now but the movie isn't about action or violence. It's actually a movie to discuss how to prevent violence with communication. Quite a stark difference from the usual movies we see nowadays.

Overall, I was still able to enjoy this movie a lot. Watching it again now brings in a few plot hole questions but these questions don't really ruin my experience with the movie. If anything I was happy to identify all of the foreshadowing that this movie had built up before the big reveals. Things do make sense but you might have to be a bit patient with this movie to get the full satisfaction you're expecting. I have to give this movie a 7.5 out of 10. I'd love to hear other people's opinions on this movie to see what they thought of it. It's also a great conversation starter.