DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve

CAST: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg

REVIEW:

Based on the short story “Story Of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, Arrival is the latest motion picture to dramatize an oft-theorized “first contact” scenario, and follows in the wake of Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian as the latest in Hollywood’s recent trend of “hard sci-fi” movies.  Among these kinds of movies, it’s a cinematic cousin to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and on the polar end of the spectrum from the likes of Independence Day.  Those looking for an action flick should look elsewhere, lest they probably be bored senseless.  Arrival is a linguistics lesson with bonus existential questions wrapped up in a slow burn, low-key docudrama that makes considerable demands of commitment and attention from a patient and intelligent audience looking for something to pick their brain rather than rev up their adrenaline.  Unfortunately, while its aims are admirable in some ways, Arrival gets so wrapped up in its own dry, professorial theorizing that as a motion picture, it never quite “arrives”. Continue reading →