I had a bad reaction to Arrival, and I want to hedge my negativity with the caveat that my hate is probably not entirely deserved. Arrival was a victim of the hype machine, and by the time I got off my ass and hit the theater it was already being hailed as the Second Coming. Hard literary Sci-Fi! In a wide theater release! Well, sort of. The science isn't all that hard, and while it's an interesting subject which hasn't been explored a lot in cinema (alien linguistics! woo!) the film doesn't do justice to the one good idea it has. But I digress. The movie had buzz. Geek media was on its side, which is a powerful force for filling seats, but raising my hopes only made for a farther fall and a more painful landing.
Arrival was a dour, drab, toneless bore. The one redeeming quality was the one interesting idea the movie had: xenolinguistics. How do we learn to communicate with aliens? How do we safeguard against miscommunication when the consequence could be annihilation? Arrival provides it's few moments of genuine entertainment trying to answer these questions and fills the rest with sleepy underwhelming suspense. A single idea can't support a whole movie the way it can a short story (the basis of the film's script) and in the process of making this "idea movie" every other element of film making craft was thrown on the pyre.
Where to start. Arrival is ugly. It's shot with an astounding lack of interest, a few artsy frames trying to excuse the relentless stream of dead-eyed closeups. The only color on the pallet is gray, to the point where someone in the editing room must have been leaning on the desaturate button during coffee breaks and couldn't be bothered to CTRL + Z afterward. Even the alien ships are just smooth iron space lumps extraordinary only in their size, something which screams artificial mystique. I mean, come on, as if any sentient species would be able to resist slapping a flag decal or a half naked Xenomorph queen on the hull. Everything about the aliens, from the empty gray interiors of their ships to their unconvincing purpose on Earth is a karate kick to my sense of verisimilitude. But then, the aliens' lack of personality may be a deliberate stylistic choice to reflect the empty humans they interact with.
Banks is our primary protagonist, or so we're lead to believe. Her defining character moment is when the aliens first Arrive. Banks strolls past swarms of chattering students crowded around an enormous TV display, alien ships center-frame, and seeing all these she promptly ignores what might well be another 9/11 and proceeds to her classroom as if nothing were happening, where she obliviously begins her lesson in front of a mostly empty lecture hall. Her slack jawed incomprehension when she finally notices her classroom has like six people in it mirrors our own incredulity--how does someone so relentlessly airheaded become a professor, let alone ambassador to an alien race? Why is this movie about her?
And she's not the only one. Not a single character in this film has a single personality trait or displays a recognizable human emotion. The blank performances of the veteran cast are no doubt the fault of the director, Denis Villeneuve, who I suspect spent every take just out of frame with a pistol, threatening to shoot anyone who showed an ounce of emotion.
Arrival shouldn't be a movie. Movies are a visual medium. They're about dramatic performances, and spectacle, and cinematography. Moments big enough to fill a fifty foot silver screen. Whatever the merits of the original short story, they do not survive the adaptation to the big screen. Film serves the story poorly, highlighting it's flaws and failing to showcase it's highlights.
Which isn't to say Arrival is bad, as hard as that may be to believe after this rant. It's not. Really. It's just mediocre, woefully undeserving of the massive hype and much more disappointing for the letdown.
-N