Paramount

PG 13 118 min

I was a theater major in college but my minors or secondary Ed and speech.and the linguistics portion is some interesting stuff, I think that was also JRR Tolkien's specialty and that's the hook of the new science fiction flick ARRIVALS.

From Klaatu to Frankenstein's monster to the Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man to the dirty joke whose punchline is death by N'Gowa, misunderstanding has been at the bottom of a lot of conflict over the years.

Anyhow unless I'm completely mistaken the entire idea of ARRIVAL it's a morality play and a ham-handed sermon about communicating with each other. No idea if it was just a coincidence that it comes out right at election time or not. I'm sure that's a possibility yet knowing how many years these things take from the drawing board to the Silver Screen nobody would have known who the two combatants oh, whoops sorry I mean candidates, we're going to be.

So here we go. Aliens are once more here on Earth. There are a bunch of them in there weird spaceships all scattered across different locations over the planet. The big deal seems to be figuring out just what the heck they are here for. You see whatever their form of language might be is completely different than ours. Now even though we have some of America's top scientists trying to figure out this dilemma it appears the person with the best chance is dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) a Linguistics expert who might just be able to figure out what these aliens (who look like a cross between a cypress tree and an octopus) might have in mind. Are they here to conquer the planet? Just to say hello? Just stopped to use the restroom? Who knows. So here is where the morality lesson starts to get just a tad bit cloying. At first all the nations have got a pretty good system going and are happily communicating with each other and sharing information. Then some of the key players start getting a little nasty about it and can only think in terms of blowing the shit out of them instead of peaceful soul searching negotiations. To let you know the producers idea of good guys and bad guys the countries that want to get rough and non cooperative are the Russkies, the Chi coms and everybody's pal the Sudan. Here in the USA of course it's the military, and Colonel Weber (Forrester Whitaker) fouling things up and nearly ruining all the progress that dr. Banks has made.

Speaking of the good doctor, for some reason the film keeps flashing back to her daughter, who apparently died of cancer and her ex-husband who is now the scientist working on the same project with her. Awkward? Not as awkward as trying to figure out why the flashbacks come and go as they do. Soon enough you will find out. It only seems like a long long time because the movie is horrendously dull and crawls along at a snail's pace.

Somehow during this plodding the team figures out almost before it's too late what it is the aliens are trying to communicate. Unfortunately it's not that exciting or even interesting, but I will let you find out for yourselves.

As always you might like it a lot better than I did.

C

WSS