I actually went and saw Arrival the day after Thanksgiving, so it's been a while but I've been thinking it over in my head. It's a great sci-fi movie, and really hit the spot in a way that another hyped sci-fi movie, Interstellar, failed to do.

Deni Vill-a-new is a great movie talent and just comes up with these incredibly refreshing and innovative camera shots that you just don't see from most directors. That long panning shot from the helicopter as it settles down and lands at the base camp comes to mind. He does it in his other movies like Sicario too. There's just a real wide-eyed sense of wonder and imagination there that I really appreciate.

And ya know, the emotional stuff, all the scenes with Amy Adams and her daughter, that all completely worked for me. I'm sitting there in the theater watching the beginning of the movie and going "Oh, they're doing the first five minutes of Pixar's Up" with the daughter scenes and it's all completely effective and natural and just beautifully executed.

So it's a great movie. I haven't seen a lot of the acclaimed 2016 movies like La La Land or Hacksaw Ridge, so I can't really judge the overall landscape, but it was certainly the best movie I saw that year.

However, I gotta say... the ending does feel noticeably weaker than the rest of the film. The rest of the film maintains this very high level of quality, but then you get to the ending and it dips a bit. I've been mulling this over and I'm gonna try to explain my thinking on why.

First of all, Jeremy Renner's line of dialogue at the end (as best as I can remember it): "All this time, I thought the greatest moment of my life would be meeting them. But actually... it was meeting you."

Just c'mon. Come the fuck on. This was just too much. Way, way too much. Show a little restraint, screenwriter. Less is more. There was no need to actually utter his feelings there like that. They should've known to cut that line out of the script. The audience is not filled with dummies, we can all see what's going on and where their relationship is going to go in the future. Subtlety was what they should've gone with, instead of this awfully blunt line. The whole movie has been treating the audience very intelligently, so this felt completely out of place.

And secondly... the flashfowards into the future give Amy Adams the answer to the dilemma and then we just watch her robotically, step-by-step reenacting them in the present. There's something very rote and unsatisfying about this solution. The whole time travel scheme of future events going back and influencing past events to then create the future events and everything being consistent and working like a clock is not that uncommon. We see it with other famous time travel movies like "The Terminator" and "12 Monkeys." And I believe that this same mechanic is what we get in Arrival. But the problem is... those two time travel classics were able to effectively balance the twin concepts of "destiny" and "free will."

What I mean by this is that those movies ultimately had the characters acting in accordance with what they were destined to do, fulfilling their roles and insuring the future that had influenced them in the first place. They couldn't escape their "destiny", at the end of the day. Yet, at the same time, they acted throughout the story with a clear sense of free will and were very much active participants. Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese didn't have sex because they were intentionally trying to create John Connor and insure the future, they did it because it just happened naturally as a result of their interactions and the events of the story. They were not acting as if following a script from the future. Same with 12 Monkeys. In the limited perspective of the individuals, they were driven by their free will, and only in the larger context of the universe's timeline did they end up creating the future that they were destined for.

Yet the ending of Arrival goes a different way. We see Amy Adams getting the flashforwards, getting the solution, and then redoing the actions in the present. Here, I find the "destiny" portion completely overriding any "free will" that she had. It's just somebody getting handed a script from the future and then following it obediently. And that's just not that satisfying to me. The human aspect gets a bit lost for me.

9/10