Alien, Fire in the Sky,  Independence Day, Men in Black, Starship Troopers, Cloverfield, Signs, Prometheus. These are some of the many movies that have successfully explored contact in some form with extraterrestrial beings in some form. And then you have films like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cocoon, Contact, Solaris, District 9, Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian, which are also movies about either extraterrestrial encounters or innovative space exploration that deal more with human component or relationship building than they do action, adventure, and a post-apocalyptic future. Add Denis Villeneuve’s (Sicario, Prisoners) Arrival as the latest movie to try to get itself on this impressive list. The critics (93% on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences (82%) have enjoyed this movie.

I wouldn’t say that I disliked this movie, but I don’t have the same praise as many others. If you haven’t seen Villeneuve’s Sicario, please see this movie. It was one of the five best movies of 2015. I haven’t met many people who have seen this movie and didn’t like it. It’s an incredible movie. I hoped Villeneuve could recapture that same success with this follow-up, but, ultimately, it was a movie I found interesting. Still, it was a little all over the place and not one that I could relate to or, to an extent, even understand its purpose.

Arrival is an ambitious movie, and it has a lot of the right parts, including Villeneuve. It has a great cast that features Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, The Crying Game) and two multiple Academy Award nominee actors (Amy Adams – American Hustle, The Fighter) and Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Town). But, unfortunately, it’s a little too much to this story. It feels like Villeneuve saw many of these movies and picked and chose his favorite parts. Couple this with an M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end that some viewers will find rewarding, and some viewers will say something like, “How convenient.”

The best part of this movie is Amy Adams. It looks like she’s already one of the five front-runners for an Academy Award nomination for Best Lead Actress. While I believe Natalie Portman (Jackie) will be nearly impossible to beat, I don’t think that even if an off-year, Adams’s performance would be good enough for a win. While she is undoubtedly due (she has five nominations as of 2015), this won’t be the role that gets her the top prize. Even those who will enjoy this movie more than I did probably won’t remember this film that they would a movie like Gravity or Inception or even Interstellar or The Martian. I don’t think it has that staying power because it doesn’t offer many new things like these previously mentioned movies. With all of that said, Adams is what makes this movie work the most.

Adams stars as Dr. Louise Banks, a university professor and linguistics expert who has recently lost a young daughter to a rare disease. We aren’t told how long it’s been from the time her daughter died until the present day, but we can assume it has been a decent amount of time. While none of us would ever fully recover from the death of a child, Louise seems to have had enough time to get her life back together. She is no longer married, and we are led to believe that the daughter’s death (or at least the illness) took its toll on their relationship.

Twelve extraterrestrial spacecraft have entered the Earth’s atmosphere and are currently hovering over locations in 12 countries, from China to Russia to Africa. Adams is recruited by Colonel Weber (Whitaker) of the United States Army to use her linguistics skills to attempt to communicate with the aliens residing in a high-rise, pill-shaped stone structure hovering some 10-20 feet above the ground on a plain in Montana. Here, Louise and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Renner) are introduced to a cast of characters that have made camp near the vessel. It’s not essential who these other characters are because they all get lost in the shovel. What is important is that some like Louise and her approach, and some have a very different strategy than trying to interpret the black cloud-like symbols emitted and projected on a glass partition from the tentacles of two octopus creatures (named Abbott and Costello by Donnelly).

While the Americans cannot agree on the means to best deal with the spacecraft in their own country, 11 other countries are trying to figure out what to do themselves. There is communication between many countries, but as time passes and progress is not made, some countries begin to do their own thing. Some even stop communicating with other countries entirely, preferring to keep their secrets to themselves. Learning more about the interactions in different countries could have been interesting, but there needs to be more time to tell that story. So, instead, we can only focus on the story in America and learn secondhand about what is happening in other countries.

Abbott and Costello each develop their personalities and become integral to the storytelling. We begin to care about them almost like each is a loving animal, much like the volleyball Wilson in Cast Away. Villeneuve does an excellent job with this because these characters never say a word, nor do we ever see anything other than obscure images of them. But as enchanting as Villeneuve wants the story to be, there isn’t much substance. The only human who has any backstory is Louise. Louise is a character we care very much about. She’s intelligent but not arrogant. She is confident but unassuming. Plenty of flashbacks showcase her love for her daughter, Hannah. But, unlike Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity, Louise doesn’t carry the grief of losing a child with her during every moment of every day. Instead, she can function. Life has gone on. But when one of the aliens puts its tentacle up to the class, and Louise places her hand on the other side, she starts seeing visions of Hannah once again. She is curious about how the aliens know about these images and why they share them with her. Trust is hard to gain with aliens, but it is easy to lose as the world tries to figure out why these aliens have arrived and what their purpose is now that they are here. While we learn of their purpose, it left me feeling unfulfilled.

There are holes in this movie, as many movies involve alien presence on Earth. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this movie is as implausible as sending a team of misfit oil rig workers into space with two weeks of training to destroy a meteor that will destroy the Earth like in Armageddon, but this has similar issues. The plot involves dealing with aliens that nobody knows anything about. Yet, the spacecraft is being entered by a linguistics expert, a theoretical physicist, and two members of the military who want to abort each mission into the spacecraft if something doesn’t go 100% as planned. While I don’t think the reaction in America (or many of these countries) will instantly be one of combat, I’m not sure we’d be pulling out professors from their teaching gigs to lead the quest to try and communicate with these extraterrestrials either. We also don’t learn what’s going on with the general population. You would think that if 12 spacecraft showed up across the globe, there would be mass hysteria. We learn that the U.S. has banned gun sales, but what about the hundreds of millions of guns already out there? We’ve seen that even the most minor incidents have resulted in mass rioting. Something like this would wreck our world, but we don’t learn any of that.

Arrival is an average movie that is being praised as something special. Adams is great. The visuals are good. The story was simple, but there wasn’t anything new. Nonetheless, Arrival is already being mentioned as an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture. I don’t see it. I’d avoid seeing it in the theater and catch it on Redbox instead.

Plot 7/10
Character Development 7/10
Character Chemistry 6.5/10
Acting 7.5/10
Screenplay 7/10
Directing 7.5/10
Cinematography 8/10
Sound 8.5/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 7.5/10
74.5%

C

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