A movie review from The Movie Snob.
Arrival (C). The critics are giving this cerebral new sci-fi flick a lot of love, but I just can’t join the chorus. The set-up is one you’ve probably seen before: giant alien spaceships suddenly appear in several different locations around the globe. They appear to resist or ignore our efforts to communicate with them–at first. A serious army guy (Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland) recruits a top-notch linguist (Amy Adams, Man of Steel) to help with the communication efforts concerning a spaceship in Montana. She teams up with a physicist (Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker) who is somehow also supposed to be able to help crack the aliens’ language. Meanwhile, military guys around the globe are getting really itchy trigger fingers. Although I agree with the critics who are lauding Adams’s lead performance, the movie as a whole just didn’t really do it for me. I liked director Denis Villeneuve’s last effort, Sicario, much better. But maybe I just wasn’t smart enough for this one.