Watching Paint Dry
Sometimes watching a movie can leave you feeling breathless. Sat on the edge of your seat, your hands clenched into fists and your palms wet from sweat as you run the gamut of emotions. On the flipside of this of course are those movies that leave you longing for the film to end as you sit slumped in your seat looking at your watch every ten minutes and consider whether you should just walk away and save yourself the pain of seeing things through to the end.
The subject of this review unfortunately finds itself firmly in the latter category and here's where I tell you why.
Arrival is directed by Denis Villeneuve who has previously directed Prisoners and Sicario and has also helmed this years Blade Runner sequel. In terms of star power Arrival boasts Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams as its two leads with supporting roles from the likes of Forrest Whittaker.
The movie begins with Louise Banks (Adams) going through life with her daughter who we see in flashes from birth through to her death as a teenager. We then see Louise in the present day going to take a class in her role as a linguist and language professor although her class is interrupted by the news that 12 huge alien spaceships have appeared at a variety of locations around the world.
We then jump forward to Louise being approached by the US military to join them to find out what the aliens are doing on Earth and it is here that she meets physicist Ian Donnelly (Renner) who has been brought in to use his skill set to help get an understanding of whats going on.
The next part of the film is based around the team learning to communicate with the Heptapods (the name we give the aliens) who can speak to us by way of using an ink based substance to create circles, each circle being slightly different to represent another word. Louise of course quickly picks up on how the circles work and begins trying to learn what the Heptapods want whilst teams at each site around the world also try to communicate although China and Russia are less open to communication and are itchy to use their military might to get rid of any potential threat.
As the film continues Louise learns more whilst suffering visions of the daughter she lost but things go south as other countries from around the world drop out of the concerted effort to remain peaceful and it comes to a head when Russia and China decide that they've waited long enough and strat trying to shoot the ships down.
Louise isn't having any of this and rushes out to the US based ship where she is picked up by a smaller ship and taken onboard the big ship for a circle based chat with a Heptapod who tells her that they are here to give a gift to humanity which turns out to be ability to see time as a non linear thing and it is also revealed that Louise has yet to have a daughter as her visions are of the daughter that she will have in the future, a child she has with Ian. She then has a vision of meeting the Chinese leader in the future and he gives her the information she needs in the present to be able to stop the attacks on the Heptapods ships. This allows her to make a phone call to the Chinese leader in the present day which of course stops the attack and allows events to unfold like she knows they will since shes seen it and all that jazz.
This leaves her knowing that she will marry Ian, have a child and ultimately lose that child at an early age, a turn of events that she understands she has to be at ease with due to the ramifications of changing things (just see any other time travel movie).
I started this review by stating that this movie falls into the category of films that leave you wishing it would end and I think the title of this post gives an indication of my feelings on what I've just watched. Now thats not to say that Arrival is a bad film by any stretch of the imagination its just that its very, very dull. It is well shot and there are no weak performances but I as a viewer was left not caring about anything that is happening on screen. At no point did the relationship between Louise and her daughter tug at the heart strings and at the end of the film when we enter the twilight zone of Louise being a time traveller it just gets too ridiculous to take onboard although I'm going to say that it probably didn't help that by the time this happened I was bored out of my mind.
There are plenty of other alien contact movies and time travel flicks out there that are far more entertaining than Arrival and are more deserving of your time so my advice would be to go and search them out. If you do have an overwhelming desire to watch Arrival however then there are worse things you could do but not many (in my opinion).
All of which just leaves my score for Arrival which I'm going to give a 7 out of 10. As I've said it is not a bad movie but it just left me cold and did nothing for me although there will of course be those of you out there who will love this with a passion.
