•
Rating: Alien ships arrive on Earth. The extraterrestrial octopuses communicate by inking messages in an apparently synthetic language, but in reality an extremely agglutinative one: each symbol, it will be discovered, is capable of describing even a complex physical theory. However, the Russians and the Chinese don't understand a damn thing and want to bomb the ships with nuclear missiles until the reasonable Americans—thanks to Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, respectively an expert linguist and a theoretical physicist—save humanity from embarrassment at the peak of tension.
No nihilistic malice like Mars Attacks. The protagonists manage to understand that the purpose of the alien visit is to teach humans the meaning of the circularity of time, because in a distant future it will be humanity that must help their race. Amy Adams manages to prevent aggression by the communists precisely because, once the language is deciphered, she is able to create a time paradox that generates a closed loop: where future consequences generate their own causes, but are also conditioned by them. The paradox is rendered through flash forwards.
The flash forward, which from a cinematic device becomes a perceptive rendering of Amy Adams's ability, becomes the main theme of the film. Interwoven through the Cold War-like affairs of civilizations, several sequences occur where Adams is a single mom dealing with her daughter's incurable illness. Disguised as flashbacks, they are later revealed to be the consequences of her romance with the nuclear physicist. But the linguist is stoic and still decides to take that path, among all her possibilities as an attractive young academic at a prestigious university, as well as savior of the world, because the child would still have time to give something like "poetry and smiles" to the world.
Looking closely, it's about red terror and pro life*, with a time paradox that is still less interesting than the interdimensional one in Interstellar. Glossy, with a boring gloss to look at: lazy and precious minimalism, more than elegant.
Now Denis Villeneuve has the Blade Runner remake in his hands and Blade Runner was indeed slow, indeed glossy, but made it a virtue.
It's time to stop with the remakes. The member berries from the last season of South Park should serve as a warning. You end up losing interest in the present, and the present is Mr. Garrison as president and original plots in cinema that are still at the level of hateful US enlightenment propaganda, because throughout the movie you find yourself hoping that the Russians and the Chinese are right and the aliens really want to attack Earth for some reason.
Moreover, with a plot hole, because if the flash forwards are a capability induced in the protagonist, their presence can't be justified from the start of the film.
A useless if not harmful movie. A load of nonsense.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[*] Pro life the last frontier of stoicism?
Loading comments slowly
Other reviews
By pozzo
The real protagonist of the whole story is not just the human in relation to the different, but it’s the language, understood truly as comprehension and openness.
Arrival is not just a film for sci-fi enthusiasts; it’s a film of surprising intelligence and remarkable emotional depth.
By Poldojackson
This movie is such a gigantic and fragrant piece of crap that reviewing it seriously is like playing its game.
The aliens are two and are called GIANNI AND PINOTTO. They are very large, like elephant-sized octopuses, half-witted.
