Reviews & Ratings for
Arrival (2016)

If you’re a Sci-Fi loyalist, Arrival is your movie.
If you’re scared of complex representations of already complex themes, Arrival still is your movie!
Denis Villeneuve’s modern masterpiece is precisely calculated and highly ambitious, for its objective exceeds telling a story.
Mysterious spacecraft touchdowns across the globe perplex humans as they struggle to solve the dichotomy of the spacecrafts’ consequential intentions. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) joins the US Army team to decipher the ‘language’ of two alien ‘heptapods’ in one such spacecraft. But, can it be called language?
As mankind teeters between violence and toleration on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers. But, do they?
To find them, does she take the chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity?
How is time actually related to metaphysics and structuralism? What do the aliens actually want inside the Earth?
Plot: Villeneuve approaches these questions with a prevailing ‘reality’, a word seemingly paradoxical to the genre yet adding substantial uniqueness and mystery to an excellent plot.
Performances: Amy Adams delivers impeccably. Her range of emotions throughout Banks’ personal losses, gradual loss of time sense and unsettling daydreams is phenomenal. The others perform at par too.
Background Score: Johann Johannsson composes an extremely appropriate and complementing score.
Cinematography:Exquisitely breathtaking work by Bradford Young. Further adjectives can be realised by one’s own self, post watching.

Different. That is the only way I can describe Arrival.

The 'Arrival' of a dozen or so UFOs on earth sparks a major frenzy, and the US government takes the help of a high school language professor and physicist to communicate with the aliens. Their ultimate goal is to find out why they paid Earth a visit. The difficulty- the aliens use a different language, of course, and it is nothing like anything humans have ever seen.

The movie is different from other mainstream alien movies. The language bit is very interesting to follow. But I felt the direction to be lacking, several scenes were a bit too slow, and the twist ending could've been shown a bit better.

Overall, it was a solid watch.