10 for me, backed up by a review to spark discussion; agreeing or disagreeing with my perspective, I'm ambivalent on that point because why take it personally. Feels like the intelligent approach to discourse.
Have you got a review? Tell you what I'll put my review here. Might stimulate a response. Might.
"Some people can't process the experience"
If you were given every piece of this jigsaw puzzle; you would need to know what the picture was before you could attempt to piece it together successfully. I would reiterate the reaction of others that the film will make you want to watch it again. Watch it again immediately, because the second time you watch it, it will look like a completely different picture; made from the same pieces of puzzle. Or, let's say, you can't make the puzzle from the pieces because it's not a puzzle at all.
Denis Villeneuve, who is a director I greatly admire for Enemy and Sicario; and feel cut his teeth to razor sharpness with Incendies and Prisoners, has accomplished something very rare and valuable with Arrival, by extending the bounds of a genre. Science Fiction always acts as a mirror straight back at humanity with ideas, however alien, being tethered to those points of comparison in human behaviour. It's less specific to talk in terms of those films that deal with similar ideas than to mention other sci fi stories. The intention isn't to imply that Arrival isn't original because it certainly is. The point of contact with our humanity is, most, readily the concept of memory and Villeneuve, audaciously, gives over five minutes of his film's opening to a crushingly sad story of loss; seen as a set of quick images birth to death. Amy Adams beautiful performance isn't lost in SF bombast beyond that point and it remains a personal journey, uninterrupted by any/many other actors; but Jeremy Renner is an absolute rock throughout the movie; displaying a wide eyed wonder that is an ad campaign for the delights of theoretical physics on its own. I'd observe that there are really only two other performances in the film, as an indication of it's extraordinary structure; that centring on, arguably, the best actor in movies (possibly before, almost certainly after this) may be a fluke of the story, but concentrating on such a great actor elevates the film further. It's her story, it has to be to complete it's own cycles nd taking this journey with any other actor, already seems impossible to imagine as the same film.
I would compare it, in its finesse of the theme, to Resnais' two masterworks on memory. Adams has to do that trick of acting with two tennis balls that all CGI requires, but her interface with scenes depicting memories is the dynamo driving Arrival. I heard Nocturnal Animals requires her to react to what she is reading and its supposed to be a core of the film (can't wait to see it) but how we move in and out of her recollections; what she tells us with her face, is key to the visceral response that should be communicated out of the screen and into our hearts. If you compare it to the slight ham-fisted nature of Sandra Bullock's loss of a child in Gravity; let's just say the compare and contrast favours one actor more than it does the other. The melancholia is supplied as a sheet by Adams, that Villeneuve lays over the film to settle on and pervade every surface.
Villeneuve establishes tone but commits to it, like very few directors. His choices, this deep blue filter, the use of cgi; serve that tone and make of the movie an experience. If I return to that idea that you could be given every piece of this jigsaw; another way to put it is that every piece is crammed with information; emotional information especially, and the whole of the puzzle is a very complicated diagram or book. You can only read one page at a time, and read it forward in time. So you aren't being denied anything at any moment, but you have to read the whole book to understand the piece of information being communicated. Like Sicario its not a case of "need to know" to hide the full picture, it's "your gonna have to stick around, pay attention and wait till the end" before the full picture will emerge. What may approach genius is that what is revealed at any point is consistent with that whole, didn't hide anything; it was an open book, but like any complex story, means nothing on its own. Since Sicario is an entirely different quantity, written by another author; I have to conclude that it is Villeneuve who is extracting this tone of opacity and complexity, and who knows how to construct films, which leave this intelligence intact and communicable to an audience. The satisfaction of intelligent science fiction, my toes wriggle with delight at this comfort food.People seem to have the idea that honing the craft of writing has the ambition of one word answers at some point in the future. Twitter is far too verbose for a lot of needs these days.