6/10

It was unusually brave of Paramount Pictures to produce an intellectual big-budget science fiction movie that wasn’t just another attempt at a special effects driven blockbuster.

This movie contains some fascinating concepts: the arrival of alien spaceships; attempts to communicate with aliens, alien physiology, military tensions, world peace, prescience and predestination. All of these subjects are presented and developed at a pleasant pace that maintains a low level of unease. I was reminded at times of the pacing of 2001 : A Space Odyssey, with close-ups of faces and long scenes of characters walking or drifting through strange surroundings accompanied by a rumbling soundtrack.

I can’t remember much of the soundtrack during the movie, as I think it was mostly indistinct atmospheric vocal and piano loops. However, Max Richter’s On The Nature of Daylight was a beautiful choice for the opening and closing credits.

The worst thing about Arrival is the use of a grey filter throughout the movie. Every scene has a washed-out grey appearance, like you have sunglasses on indoors. Even scenes shot outside probably in bright sunlight have a grey curtain over them. After an hour of this filtering I was quite irritated. Post-processing filtering of movies is a modern disease. Go back and look at the Lord of The Rings movies and notice how everything is tinged pale blue and pale flesh colours. Many modern movies are so colour desaturated that they might as well have been shot in black-and-white.

Days after seeing the movie I discovered that the alien language was invented by Stephen Wolfram and his son Christopher. Stephen is the inventor of the software package Mathematica, which is one of the most visionary and powerful pieces of publicly available software ever created. For more technical information see the Blog entry Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

The silliest part of the movie plot by a long shot is the attempt to link Louise’s flash-backs/forwards with paranormal powers detectable by the aliens. You mean ... she’s The Chosen One?! It’s the only serious credibility speedbump in the movie.

The original short story by Ted Chiang contains the far-fetched idea that language alters linear time and determinism, but luckily this was almost completely omitted from the movie script.

At the end of the movie I felt like I’d been taken on a calculated and serious tour, but on returning home I wondered what the point was. All the different plot points and characters didn’t seem to blend and culminate in a really satisfying way. Was there a message? Movies don’t have to have a message, but this isn’t an arthouse movie, it’s a big budget SF movie and I expected more. Did I sit through 2 hours of movie just to learn that some aliens want to encourage world peace?

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