Went to see Arrival yesterday in the local cinema. The premise is the arrival of a number of alien ships at a number of locations around the world. The questions around their arrival (are they hostile/will they provide a technological advantage to one nation) throws an insecure human race into turmoil. The US army recruits a linguist (Amy Adams) and a physicist (Jeremy Renner) to lead a team tasked with communicating with the aliens.
Overall, I quite liked the movie. Without giving too much away, many aspects of the plot and the ideas around it are fairly original and interesting. If you're looking for an action flick, you'd be advised to look elsewhere, this one is a pot boiler.
My main objection is incredibly languid pacing. Despite deft and swift development of Amy Adam's character at the beginning, progression was generally very slow, and a number of scenes felt like they could have been cut to tighten the pacing. Perhaps the director was trying to project the sense of slow progress the team was making with translating the alien language. Either way, I would have been more engaged had the movie been 20-30 minutes shorter. That said, I tend to be less patient watching movies in the cinema (have to endure 20 mins of ads/trailers first, can't just pause the movie and walk around). As a minor objection, I felt some parts of the movie where overly sentimental.
It might seem like I didn't like Arrival much, but it's difficult to talk much about what I did like, without giving away chunks of the conceptually interesting plot.
