10 Films That Wanted To Be Star Trek
4. Arrival
In many ways, Arrival feels like a big-budget, extra-long episode of Star Trek. The story revolves around the attempt to communicate with a species not of this world, with little to no emphasis on action. In fact, many of the negative reviews that the film received highlighted its slow pace and largely dialogue-heavy script.
Amy Adams stars as the linguist brought in by the military to try and find common ground with this race of aliens. She feels like a lift from episodes of The Original Series - something we say as a compliment here, for when Star Trek was at its best, it was attempting to solve the issues of the universal nature of understanding.
Arrival also focuses on the topic of time, something that features again and again (pun not intended) in Star Trek. Both Star Trek IV and Star Trek: First Contact see the various crews of the Enterprise traveling through time to save humanity, with many episodes of the various series visiting it as a theme as well.
All else aside, Arrival is a film that dares to take its time to tell its story. Though visually impressive, it relies less on the CGI of the world it creates and more on the story built within said world. It falls into the same type of SciFi in which Star Trek lies - boldly going forward, rather than simply blowing things up.