Arrival [DVD]

I find all the reviews giving this movie 2 and 3 stars hilarious. They talk about Star Trek and other sci-fi films, generally in order to express their outrage at the movie. Guys, grow up. You are absolutely missing the point. Just as the Rocky movies would have the "children", as I did when I was a child, believing that it was all about Boxing and beating the big bad, Arrival is set up around the premise that we are being visited by Aliens and that's what the movie is about. And, yes, there is lots of Aliens, just as there was lots of Boxing in Rocky. However, both are actually romantic movies. Rocky is all about overcoming your demons and the little guy beating the odds. Arrival is more about the beauty and tragedy that life can bring you and whether or not you'd still venture down the same roads in life if you knew the outcome. Its about being a parent. About loving your children and the pain of losing them. It hit me like a sledgehammer, being a new parent. It might be the most moving film I've ever seen. And the instrumental behind it is simply beautiful.

Just finished watching Arrival. Nice to see Jeremy Renner in a film where he isn't shooting someone or blowing things up. The flipping back and forth in time with the family stuff got a bit tedious, as did the navel-gazing, and the soundtrack was too much, and oppressive. There's a Star Trek: Next Generation episode (Season 5, Episode 2: 'Darmok') that does something similar with language and understanding, but in only 40 minutes. Arrival could have been shorter, and would have been better for it, and I would have liked more dialogue, ideally audible, by way of exposition. And it was very dark. Even daylight scenes were flat and dully-lit. Sorry folks, not a patch on Close Encounters (my second favourite film), or The Day the Earth Stood Still, not to mention 2001: a Space Odyssey. Not a film I'll be returning to. Villeneuve aspiring to be Tarkovsky by making a really boring film.

I didn't like it - much too dark, gloomy photography, come to think of it, it was as similarly mystifying and ultimately then as pretentious as Interstellar and I didn't like that either. What's it trying to say - don't really know - other than we should be more transparent to avoid misunderstanding what's important. Although in the film this was only achieved through some sort of psychic link with the future? Yeah right!I don't think any benign extra-terrestrial presence would reveal itself like this, and nearly start WW3. Contrived!