I have to go against the grain here. I thought that Arrival would be a beautiful watch, but what I was left with was a cliched story that is just missing something in its delivery. To its credit, the sound design and shot composition alone evoke feelings of mystery, of loneliness, of tension to great effect. I definitely am sympathetic to those who felt the pacing was too slow, and it did not evoke as much of an emotional reaction as I would have hoped. Who doesn’t love when half of those emotional scenes are just Amy Adams staring at something?
It’s a film that manipulates the temporality of traditional story-telling with a subversion of linear momentum as it goes on, while drip-feeding fleeting human moments. Arrival itself attempts to be this comprehensive challenge to preconceived human notions. For the majority of the movie, we’re focused on cracking the tantalizing alien language through traditional understandings of writing and communication. However, it is really time that is the language between human and alien. Knowing about the suffering of Louise’s child that is to follow and understanding its necessity, akin to an acceptance of divine planning, she poetically embraces that fundamental experience of the human condition despite the cost of ensuing grief.
