Countdown to the Oscars | “Arrival” Review

The Oscars is soon (a week from now) and I wanted to actually know what deserves what before it happens. I’ve seen about eight of the movies that are nominated for awards so far. I’m going to watch as many of the nominated movies as I can before the 26th. So. Here’s what I thought about Arrival. Spoilers.

Arrival tackles some pretty big, pretty important messages and does it pretty well. I know it’s an alien movie, but it’s more than that. It’s about discovery, time, humanity in general. It raises a lot of questions and made me think. I loved that.

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” Well, first of all, it depends on if I can even change it. If you could see into your future like Louise does, that means that what you will do has to happen in order for you to see it, right? Or was that only a possible future that would happen if she kept going a certain path? This will get into more time travel-related questions (even though this is not really a story about time travel), so I’ll leave you to decide for yourselves how this works. That question, though, is crazy and deep. I’m a sucker for crazy and deep.

The aliens were there because they needed help from humans in three thousand years. Does that mean they saw something bad happen in the future and now they’re enlisting us to change it? Or did they see us helping them in three thousand years, so they’re just assuring we’ll know what to do by then? Who knows! It’s possible Louise could’ve changed her future, but I think the point was, she didn’t want to and also…butterfly effect. Just saying!

All the actors did a good job. I haven’t seen Jeremy Renner in anything other than a Marvel movie, so it was good that whenever he was onscreen, I never saw Hawkeye, I saw Ian. Amy Adams, as always, doing great! And Forest Whitaker, as well. Like I said, everyone did a fantastic job and gave emotional and believable performances.

The story was very compelling for me. For one thing: aliens. Yes, please. And learning how to communicate with them, too! These movies are also entertaining for me partly because I get to see how the government(s) would freak out in this world the movie has created. Is it annoying sometimes? Yes, you leave those innocent aliens alone; they just wanna help us so we can help them! But is it interesting to see? Of course. That along with the character’s stories really kept me immersed.

And another thing: it felt like a big puzzle. Once I started to question when things were happening, it was fun to take everything and try to place it on a timeline before they actually explained what was going on. Pausing halfway through the film and theorizing with my parents was also fun.

The ending made me feel a lot of mixed emotions which in my opinion is kind of a good thing. Maybe that’s what they were trying to do. It was an extremely bittersweet ending, that’s for sure. Thank you for making me sad/happy, Arrival.

I loved the aliens. The way they spoke was interesting, the way they wrote was cool, the way they looked was great. I loved watching the process of figuring out their language. There really isn’t much I would change about this movie!

Here are some random thoughts:

The slow realization about what the aliens are trying to teach them and what they’re trying to do was very well done. The foreshadowing in particular was good.

The score was good, though somewhat distracting in one part in the beginning. I liked the music overall. It felt right for the tone and subject matter.

I remember laughing at one or two establishing shots in the film that lasted a bit too long. I mean, it looked cool. But I get it, this is the base next to the aliens. We know what it looks like now.

One of the aliens died from that stupid explosion and the other one had to stay behind all by himself on that ship! “Abbott is in death process.” I suppose since time isn’t linear for them, he’s not really gone. He’ll always be in the process of dying (don’t think about it too much it’s confusing don’t think about it too much it’s confusing).

Cancer is a bitch, but that isn’t news, this movie just reminded me. Thanks, movie.

Louise went through all that trouble to save everyone, including the aliens and lived with the burden of knowing the future. And when she finally told someone about it, he got mad and left her. And eventually, her daughter died (see above)!

Humanity is, overall, stupid and it’ll take a while to achieve the unity we see at the end of this film, sadly. But I do think and hope it’s possible.

To end on a happier note…I really want to write like the aliens now, just without gaining the psychic powers. It was such a cool concept!

And can we take a second to admire these posters? They’re beautiful.

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So in conclusion, Arrival was a fantastic movie. If for some reason you’re still reading this and you haven’t seen it, please go see it. It’s a good sci-fi drama. Now, I just have eight other films to see, and I’ll tell you which one I think deserves the award for best picture!

Please like and share and comment and all that good stuff so we can get a nice discussion going. Thanks for reading 🙂