Movie Review - Arrival

What does a contact lens, a hand knuckle and a coffee stain have in common? This movie's visuals!

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen this movie and intend to see it, turn around now cause I have spoilers coming!

If you're an avid movie watcher, like myself, and you enjoy movies so much that every time you enter a cinema you're already debating the beginning and ending of the film, you know that there are three terrible clichés when it comes to solving movie endings: That's aliens, dreams and time-travel!

Almost every movie that provides a very complicated mystery/problem with a twist at the end falls down into these three. "The aliens did it!" or "Man wakes up and all a dream!" and of course "Just time travel and deal with the problem before it occurred!". These are all the most common (and worst) endings to movies that provide some sort of problem-solving in the last five minutes of the movie... and I hate them all for it!

The best movies are the ones that provide one of these solutions early on but in the end we are presented with nothing we we're even aware it was happening, right in front of us. Examples like Memento, Sixth Sense, The Game, Shawshank Redemption are all excellent examples of movies where the ending makes the entire movie and none of them resort to any of these clichés, that's why they are so awesome, right?!

Here, although we have a very good movie with excellent editing, cinematography and sound design, I already knew the twist before it came cause it fell into all three clichés category.

So here's my review. See this movie, talk about it but be sure to know that if you're an avid moviegoer you'll not be surprised or amazed at the end.

A time-travel three out of five!