Arrival Review: 10 Reasons It's An Instant Classic

I have a real thing for a movie that’s actually about something more than it first sees. Her seemed to be a commentary on where our obsession with technology could take us, yet unfolded to be an affectionate, offbeat love story, while Birdman bombed through it’s superhero commentary to flip onto a pondering on ego.

Arrival is, to a degree, the same; while the film’s exploration of linguistics provides essential narrative background, it’s not what the movie’s about. This becomes apparent when the process of … learning how to communicate with the extra-terrestrials is covered mostly in a single, multi-month spanning montage; the mechanics of the two species communication isn’t what’s important, it’s the journey it leads to.

And the destination of that journey is a musing on life. We get a nice undercurrent about frayed political states, but like several recent standout movies – Green Room and Bone Tomahawk specifically – Arrival is about the insurmountable fear of the inevitability of life, but injects a sense of optimism in there, an appreciation of the joy inherent in the simple nature of life.