This looks… interesting.
And by that I mean on an intellectual level. Bridging the language gap is, of course, a staple of First Contact stories, which means that it’s a staple of science fiction. So seeing a movie where this is apparently the focus is kind of neat. But at the same time… can they manage to pull it off?
This isn’t supposed to be a slam on Hollywood: there are things that are hard to do visually, and telling a story where the action is in a rather intangible and esoteric arena is one of them. The international trailer gives out some hope that there’s some sort of interstellar diplomatic skulduggery going on, here. That could actually give the language stuff an immediately obvious action framework to hang off of. So… I guess we’ll see.
Well, Amy Adams is cute as a button, I like Jeremy Renner, and Forrest Whitaker is a damn fine actor, so I’ll go see it.
“The Arrival” was, is, and always will be a terrible Charlie Sheen Sci Fi movie. They should have gotten a different title.
Frankly the most interesting first contact story I’ve ever read was John C. Wright’s Count to A Trillion. The Alien(tm), whom we won’t see until much later are having a bit of trouble communicating with us since we’re as intelligent to them as amoeba. So they need to leave foolproof instruction to uplift our intelligence to a point where communication is possible (and we’re sufficiently usefully enough for them to bother talk to).