Arrival(2016)

IMDB Score: 7.9/10

Letterboxd Score: 4.1/5

My Score: 4.5/5

7 Academy Award Nominations, including best motion picture, and 1 Academy Award holder, best achievement in sound editing.

7 BAFTA nominations and 1 BAFTA holder, best sound.

NOTE: In this blog, there could be some minor SPOILERS about the movie so please WATCH the movie first and then come back to this blog :)

I don’t even know where to start. The movie was nearly flawless. Denis Villeneuve, as we can remember him from Dune(2021) and Blade Runner 2049(2017), proved how a mastermind he is again. Even though there were some very minor inconsistencies in the storyline, they were nothing to do with the main scenario therefore these small inconsistencies didn’t reduce the quality of the movie at all.

Even though maybe we can say Arrival is at least a little bit influenced by Contact(1997) and District 9(2009), in my opinion, Arrival is better nearly in every way than those movies. The movie's tempo was exactly what should it be and the aliens in the movie weren’t speaking English as in some other Hollywood movies, also it would be weird to aliens speak English in a movie focused on solving aliens’ language.

Amy Adams truly lived the character, Louis, and once again proved why she is one of the most talented actresses of her generation. I believe, it was really unfortunate for Amy Adams to be faced Emma Stone from La La Land in the 2017 BAFTA. However, I really couldn’t understand why Jeremy Renner was in the movie. First of all, I am not saying Jeremy Renner did a bad job in playing his character, Ian. Nevertheless, I really couldn’t comprehend what was the purpose of Ian in the storyline. Even though at the beginning of the movie, Ian was looking like one of the key characters to solve the UFOs mysteries, he didn’t do anything significant to solve the mystery, except one 30 second long scene.

As a huge fan of Hans Zimmer and John Williams, I can say that the original songs in a sci-fi movie are one of the most important things for me, and Arrival’s music composer Jóhann Jóhannsson did a huge job. As we can remember Jóhann Jóhannsson from the movie of Theory of Everything, without a doubt, Jóhannsson’s works in Arrival was one of the most successful works in his career.

Even though I loved nearly all aspects of Arrival, one thing that I didn’t like in the movie was we can easily find the traces of Orientalist Hollywood Cinema. As we can observe in many of the Hollywood movies, eastern countries, especially China and Russia, are shown like the irresponsible, unreliable, and deal breaker countries of the world. In some scenes, some eastern countries acted without considering the future results of their actions. As like in most Hollywood movies, the USA was our absolute hero and some of the eastern countries were made it difficult to solve the shared problem of the world.

In conclusion, I really loved the movie and if you are a sci-fi lover and haven’t watched Arrival yet, you shouldn’t lose even a minute and start watching it.