Not having anything better to do on a shitty wet Saturday evening, we went to the movies and saw The Arrival. The movie started as a downer with Amy Adams as the main character. She has just had a child, started raising the child, and you can tell immediately that that child ain't gonna make it. We see clips of her moving along, and by the time she is almost full grown, she has some rare disease and passes away. Good movies don't start this way, my opinion.
So now she is left to collect her tattered life, although she is a college professor, and has this house overlooking an awesome lake, I find it hard to believe a professor would be able to afford this type of house on one person's salary. Suddenly, the focus of the frame is finally off her and we start seeing other people, she is on a campus and nobody seems to be paying attention, not much different than any ordinary day, with kids distracted by their phones. One of the kids tells her to turn on a TV to the news, and finally we start hearing something interesting. They are talking about twelve extraterrestrial objects, but we still don't see them, unless you saw a preview, of course. She doesn't seem interested and despite looking like the world might end, she is still going to campus and sitting at her office trying to look busy.
Finally, Forest Whitaker shows up as an important army guy, her country needs her, for she is an expert in languages and they want her to translate between the aliens and humans. She hesitates, based on crappy voice recorders, saying she needs to interact with the aliens, when the army says no, we will go to the next guy, she pretty much says, test him first, he is a fraud. A while later, the army shows up scaring the crap out of the lake with a night time helicopter landing in her tiny backyard. They figure out they need her and they want her, so she will get to see the aliens.
We finally see the alien spacecraft, floating just above the earth, it looks like a pistachio half shell, or something like that. It takes awhile, but eventually Amy starts figuring out their language, and while she is doing so, is starting to have more and more dreams of her daughter. Of course, a movie has to have an impetus and thus she can't keep working at her pace. The Chinese are being pains in the ass demanding they will start a war with the pistachio shell over their country. Just when the Americans are breaking down and fixing to start their own attack, she has a flash dream where she figures out how the aliens communicate and she understands that their language is not controlled by time, so she can go back in time and in the future at will.
It gets very confusing here because in order to stop the Chinese guy in charge she has a dream in which she sees his phone number, and he whispers something very delicate in her ear which she is then able to call her and he repeats this delicate phrase. This essentially stops him and allows the exchange between Amy Adams and the aliens to continue.
The confusing part was Hannah was the daughter's name before the aliens show up. It turns out, the daughter had drawn scenes of Amy and Daddy with a bird in a cage, which we see in front of the aliens. She also has a scene of an alien playing with them. In the end, the Amy character and the scientist played by Hawkeye fall in love, and they go have a kid named Hannah. Now did she have two kids and named both of then Hannah? That seems a little cruel. Was she seeing the future in dreams and finally had Hannah after she met the scientist Hawkeye? Is the second little girl also going to die of the rare genetic disease, and Hawkeye is still the scientist guy who leaves her or does she only have sex with scientist dudes and names all her children Hannah. I want to think that she was having a sort of dream sequence in the beginning, that Hannah did not really come into being until after she met the scientist, but then again Amy's book was dedicated to Hannah.
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