Movie Review: ARRIVAL (2016) C

This movie was nominated for an Academy Award.  It was one of the losers.  It was billed as a science-fiction movie.  Unfortunately, it didn't have too much science and the fiction was incoherent.  Just a mish-mash of random scenes that appeared to be pasted together from the cuttings on the editing room floor. (With today's technology, they were assembled from the digital cuts).

This is what the movie looked like.  When mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe, an elite team--lead by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams)--are brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers--and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity. But first we see touching scenes of her and daughter who, unfortunately passes away in her tweens.

This was from a critic who is in the fourth dimension: A new film from Denis Villeneuve . It’s brainy, with its hero linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) offering explications of concepts like the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. It’s mind-bending, reveling in the kind of time paradoxes that dare you to diagram them with elaborate flowcharts. And it’s wonky, with its other main character, a theoretical mathematician played by Jeremy Renner, explaining one of the film’s twists by revealing that .083333 … is (spoiler alert?) precisely equivalent to 1/12.

And like many recent sci-fi movies, Arrival focuses on alien contact. That alien race first appears around the globe in giant, somewhat Sphere-ical spaceships

The film’s tagline “Why are they here?” is in fact its driving question. Most of the action, such as it is, involves Amy Adams’ linguist and Jeremy Renner’s mathematician trying to speak to the aliens and figure out what they’re saying back. All the chat about nonlinear orthography can get a bit academic, and its dominant motif also functions as a kind of microcosm of all these brainy, high-toned sci-fi movies: scientists pointing markers at whiteboards while explaining the inner workings of the plot.