Arrival

While this should have been a good movie, I am in the minority. I didn't like it.
It had all the ingredients but it failed to make a point. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a linguistic professor living a mundane existence when something strange happens. Twelve mysterious pods appear randomly around the world. In order to figure out how they are communicating, her services are required. She is joined by Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) who is a theoretical physic from Los Alamos. The rest of the characters aren't explained that well.
This was the problem for me. None of the characters, with the notable exception of Adams really had personalities or character quirks. Where The Martian succeeded, this film failed. Even Renner just lets Adams take the reigns, and it truly explores the language of the heptapods, the dementer like creatures who live in the pods, while his research is never mentioned again. The language of the heptapods is circular, just like their view of time, which comes to play big time in this film.
The big twist in this film is that all the flashbacks of Louise spending time with her now dead daughter are actually in the future as she doesn't meet her husband until the pods appear. Yes, that's right. She marries Ian. In the future, or is the past? Does it matter, time is circular?
The other big twist is that the aliens want the whole world to work together to figure out the language. And China is about to put up a fight, but Louise sneaks a satellite phone and calls the Head of the Chinese army and tells him, in perfect Mandarin, the words of his dying wife, which had been, in turn, told to her eighteen months in the future when the two finally meet in person.
While this film does truly make you think, for me it was Louise having a baby even though she knew her daughter would die too young from cancer and that her marriage was doomed to fail, it lacked things a film should have, such as fully developed characters. And I love a good love story, and it failed on that level, with not enough chemistry or fun flirting or even many loving looks between them, especially coming from Louise. The only time she is in love, it is with her baby, Hannah. To me, it is unclear why a bomb is planted inside the pod and who in particular does it. And yet, they still let Louise and Ian enter, knowing that it could kill them. Fortunately, the aliens, called Abbott and Costello by Ian save them.
It is unfortunate that I didn't like this film as the cinematography was earthy and the music haunting, but the script was deeply flawed, at least in my humble opinion. While it is nice and different having friendly aliens, helping to save the planet, to save the world from starting an unnecessary war that wouldn't have started in the first place if the pods had never showed up. Grade: B