Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

Arrival posits that a dozen alien vessels appear one day over seemingly random locations around the world and hover there sphinx-like while humanity runs around in a flap trying to decide what to do about them. A linguist drafted in to try to communicate with the inscrutable newcomers takes centre stage.
Villeneuve's film has been much lauded, largely for eschewing the standard alien menace road in favour of a more intellectual angle. It is also strong on mood-setting. Irrespective of these virtues, when judged outside the genre confines it doesn't stand up so well to scrutiny. The notion that beings so advanced that they can get here, in their 2001 monoliths, would then be incapable of working out our crude syntax is as ridiculous as ever, never mind that we could decipher their fuzzy circles of supposed language instead. Accordingly, the message of hope that they finally impart is equally woolly.
The film's strongest aspects, i.e. the lead character's dawning realisation of the fate of her future daughter and how that impacts her choices here and now, twinned with the notion of events in time as something immutable and ever-present rather than linear and finite, are unfortunately somewhat buried under the global-level portentousness. A braver script would have trusted that these themes had sufficient power to sustain interest by themselves, without any of the sci-fi hoo-ha.

6/10