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Intelligent and sensitive--a thinking person's sci-fi. This is not a feel-good movie for the family. It's based on Ted Chiang's short story, "Story Of Your Life." A lot was added to flesh out a screenplay and script for a movie. In all, they did a great job.

Here's the deal, to tell the story of another person's life--the complete story--you have to know how and when they die. If you knew this about yourself or someone very dear to you, would you still come across time to accept that fate? Many would not. And many would.

I literally lost the love of my life less than three weeks ago. It is the most excruciating pain I have ever known, and pain and I are old companions. And yes, I would come across time to catch up with her again, despite the agony in store for me. She was THAT good.

Amy Adams owns this role, and Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker give great performances.

Hint: This movie is great in the way that the Star Trek TNG episode, "The Inner Light" is great. Know that and you'll love this.

For laser battles and mindless action sequences seek out something from JJ Abrams. If you love the New Star Trek, you'll likely hate this movie.

RayB

I thought I was watching a well acted scifi movie with some major stars. It was supposedly about a translator Amy Adams trying avert some sort of war with space aliens by translating between us and them. A few minutes toward the end of the movie, the plot just goes down the drain and nothing is comprehensible any more and all forms of previous plot and storyline scrapped and it's suddenly a soap opera with no SciFi connections at all. I'm sick of picking a SciFi movie to watch and getting soap opera chick flicks instead. Horrible ending that didn't even make sense.

SPOILER ALERT...

There were scenes where she was having flashbacks to a daughter who had died of cancer or something. At least that's what it looked like.

The tension builds in the movie to the war getting ever more likely due to a Chinese General picking a fight with the aliens.

She somehow has a telpathic like contact with the aliens and the story goes to hell really fast. Now suddenly she's some sort of mind reader, future seer who is to save the world. She calls the general and tells him something we are never told about and the war talk ends and everybody backs down. Why? Wasn't explained and we don't know what she said to him. Then apparently we are in her future and she and the scientist are married and the dead daughter is alive and well and we are lead to believe her earlier flashbacks were what? Flash forwards?

And what has any of this got to do with the aliens or why peace was obtained? Who cares about her marriage and daughter? This is not supposed to be about her screwed up romantic life. Did the aliens travel for years and years to get here only to fix Amy Adams love life? What happened to the aliens? Why did the general back down? Why did this alien SciFi movie suddenly become a soap opera, love story, chick flick?

Completely incomprehensible ending that was a major disappointment to what had previously been a slow but good story. It's almost like they took the story away from a scifi writer and handed it to a soaps writer and said "Here now you do what you want to finish the story".

If it wasn't for the horrible meaningless ending, I might have given this movie 4 stars. But like it ended, it barely deserves 2 stars.

How did this get 4 stars? Slight spoiler alert follows... 3 aliens that look like a cross between elephants and octopus stand in a smoky blurry room and draw smoke rings over and over. That is the whole movie.

Easily the most extraordinary movie in my lifetime, both provocative and evocative. It bears viewing and re-viewing (I have already seen it about a dozen times) for the subtleties, even of verb tenses (tense = time) in the lines of the characters. The "sci" is not without some minor imperfections, but, in movies for mature minds, it is the "fi" which counts. The shifts in and of time are intriguing and well but not perfectly worked out, but, then, how can any play with time be perfectly worked out since we do not understand it? The theme of communication not only with the aliens, but also among people, is rich and multi-layered. There are moral questions in the relationship between the two leads which emerge to intrigue us, involve to some degree the philosophical questions about free will or determinism, but which viewers must answer for themselves.

The only interpretive comment which I shall make is about the mists which are evident everywhere; they play off the old metaphor, the mists of time.

You wait the whole movie for some action or to hear something profound and you get hokey bull. Amy's character can see the future? What a waste of my time. Bothe boring and ridiculous.

Iconic. Well thought out. This movie didn't hand you the info on a silver platter. It first gave you the menu, sat you in a really sweet comfortable area in a dimly lit cafe. There were appetizers, a main course, and dessert. The use of the cloudiness in dealing with the aliens, and a cloudy setting in Montana made you feel like a kid having to go to school on a rainy day, sitting on a bus, looking out at the overcast sky & daydreaming. It also raises a consistent principle from other sci-fi stories: What if aliens can communicate with us in our dreams?

So many pieces, I'm sure this is the movie that not only keeps you guessing, but one that you can come back to time and again and still discover something new!

This movie will be studied in film classes, science classes, philosophy classes, and psychology classes for sure!

Unfortunately, only in the movies is world peace possible =(

Spoiler Alert! The sequel is coming out 3,000 years from now ;)

I just finished watching this incredible film and wholeheartedly agree with the hype surrounding it, and the awards/accolades showered upon it that it won. The layered narrative was intelligent, devoid of spoon feeding, emotionally gripping and (in my opinion) an accurate representation of how our first contact would actually transpire.

I'm going to try and make this review as concise as possible, but it will be filled with spoilers because I feel that the negative reviews crying about the movie's pace and it's supposed 'randomness' and 'incoherence'/'nonsense' storyline are not only ridiculously inaccurate, but depressingly indicative of a generation of movie-goers and audience-participants afflicted with a kind of attention deficit derived from cancerous reality TV and unhealthy addictions to the 140/280-status-update-social-media-entertainment reality that unfortunately pervades society's everyday life now. ARRIVAL is not only an entertaining movie, but it's narrative made complete sense and was stunningly original and, ultimately, refreshing thanks to a kind of Drake-equation-authenticity approach to crafting a plausible scenario about humanity's first encounter with an advanced intergalactic wayfaring species.

So, being as brief and succinct as I can, here is the plot explained.

1. Louise and Ian are recruited to decipher the newly arrived visitor's language in an effort to uncover our guest's true motive for visiting.

2. I'm an earlier discussion in the film, Ian asks Louise about a linguistic theory and whether or not she abides by it's stated principal: when an individual immerses themselves in the study of new language(s), they ultimately rewire their synapses/brain chemistry and alter the way they interact with perceived reality and use of their senses. The name of the theory eludes me atm but it's stated in the movie.

3. Ian and Louise begin to immerse themselves in this new language with incredible results. Louise begins having flashbacks to the life of her and her husband daughter, who died at a tender young age from a rare, unknown affliction when she was a young teenager.

4. The round-the-clock immersion into Heptapodese logogram (the alien language and it's written symbols) also causes Louise to begin dreaming in Heptapodese logogram, as well as the Heptapodese spoken. This is evidenced by a brief spat between Louise and Ian where Ian asks Louise if she's been dreaming in Heptapodese instead of English, to which Louise replies, "so what, that doesn't mean I can't still do my job." The obvious takeaway is yes, Louise is in fact dreaming in the alien tongue (also evidenced by a very brief 5 second dream sequence where we see a Heptapod standing over Hannah and Louise's beds before Louise is jolted awake by the 18-hour-interval klaxon).

5. China and Russia give the Heptapods an ultimatum: leave in a day, or we will annihilate you; total destruction. Heptapods respond with a visual metaphor as well as a linguistic one: Twelve together are one (proceeded by the rotation of the Heptapod spheres revealing that each sphere is actually a perfectly measured fragment of an even bigger sphere which would be created if each of the twelve spheres parked in around the world decided to combine together (evidenced by Ian's measurement epiphany of 100 ÷ 12 after Heptapod Costello gives them that massively layered message). This makes Louise realize that the Heptapods are trying to tell them not to attack, but to combine all their knowledge learned from their encounters so they can communicate with them more productively. Against the wishes of cooler heads, a rogue faction of mutineers sabotage one of Louise and Ian's meetings with Abbott and Costello with C4 and Bushmasters in a futile attempt at attacking the Heptapods and killing Louise/Ian because of their antagonistic stance towards aggression. This of course fails, and the Heptapods save Louise and Ian by ejecting them from their ship before the c4 explosion can kill them. Unfortunately, the explosion mortally wounds one of the Heptapods and so all humans are now banned from entering the ship--except the translators.

6. Louise runs away from the compound after having a prescient vision of the Heptapod black ink swelling her hands which forces her to Intuit that the Heptapods want to speak to her and only her. So she runs to the middle of an open steppe and the Heptapods transport her aboard their ship. The surviving Heptapod expresses the other Heptapod's death to Louise to which she commiserates and apologizes for her species irrational and fearful behavior. She asks for the Heptapod to again reiterate the true nature/purpose of their visit, which it replies 'to help humanity, so that they can help us 3,000 years from now. ... The weapon we offer you is time. ... Louise can see the future." Louise learns that the Heptapods want to give her the gift of prescience/clairvoyance, but she can't understand how they will give it to her, or how it will work once they do give it to her.

7. Louise then has a 'flashback' about a conversation she once had at a UN event/Galla with General Shang, China's military figurehead spearheading the 24 hour ultimatum against the Heptapods. In this memory, Shang thanks Louise for reciting his wife's dying words of love to him because of the comfort and tranquility these words bring him in times of hardship. Louise then risks a charger of treason to make a satellite phone call to China to convince them to stand down from their ultimatum and to participate in the complete exchange and sharing of all gathered intelligence from the Heptapod interactions. Because of Louise's words to Shang, China agree s and the rest of the world follows China's lead.

8. Peace is restored as China softens it's stance and eliminates the ultimatum. The Heptapods leave after completing their job of giving humanity it's most useful weapon: itself. Humanity teams up to solve problems and boost progress, instead of competing and behaving surreptitiously. This is hinted at earlier in the film when Halpern comments to Louise and Ian something along the lines of 'How would you get anything done as an alien species if the other species your interacting with is divided into several leaders without one true position of power to guide everyone?' (not verbatim, but it's the exact spirit of what Halpern was saying.

9. Louise realises finally that, after all this time, her flashbacks of her daughter Hannah are actually prescient visions of a daughter that she has yet to give birth to. This epiphany tires back into the early part of the film when Ian take about the linguistic theory where fully immersing oneself in a new language alters the way one interacts with reality. Louise has immersed herself so deeply in Heptapodese logogram that it's effectively rewired her brain, making her clairvoyant.

10. It turns out that Ian is going to be Louise's future husband, and the father to their daughter Hannah. The movie ends with a sort of clairvoyant memory reel of the life of Louise, Ian, and Hannah's future journey together before tragedy takes Hannah away from them at a young age. We learn that the memories of Hannah randomly had throughout the movie were actually the sequences where her brain was altering itself as it tried to acclimate to this new prescient way of interacting with reality and time. Yet again, there's as very brief scene where Louise explains to the Colonel that Heptapodese logogram doesn't express time in a linear fashion like humanity's languages do--an early hint at the notion that whoever buckles down and learns Heptapodese logogram will ultimately be able to perceive time in a non-linear fashion.

Honestly, I thought ARRIVAL was a beautiful, almost magical film. It was so much more than a kind of ID4 Doomsday Alien flick that permeates the global cinematic universe. ARRIVAL may be a film about Heptapods and our attempts at understanding them, but ultimately it's a passionate movie about humanity coming together to genuinely better understand itself.

I know I said I would be brief, and I tried, but it looks like I failed (lol). Kudos if you read my wall of text, I hope this explained the story my clearly. If it clarified things, I also hope that it shorted your negative opinions on the film into more positive ones.

Bravo to Villeneuve and everyone involved in creating arrival. It's now in my top 5 alien films of all time! I give it six out of five stars and would definitely recommend to anyone who likes mature sci-fi with an emotional drama component to its narrative. Cheers

I thought the first one was bad. I think this one is worse. Kept waiting for it to get better, it didn’t. Yes I understand what the underlying message is. No that doesn't make the movie better. It is disjointed and predictable. Giant, time traveling squid aliens are good. All human military’s are stupid, paranoid and trigger happy. And the perpetually sad language professor is the only one who is enlightened enough to save the world.

I noticed that most reviewers that rank this movie poorly are attacked; called knuckle dragging imbeciles that only like Chuck Norris movies and didn't have the intellect to appreciate the majestic breath of this film.
Let's see then; these squids things come to Earth to make sure we don't kill ourselves because they can see into the future and they need us in the future to save or help them. Why? That's never explained, but maybe they are making sure that our population is bountiful so that they have something to eat when their planet runs out of food.
Then it's the lead actress; she gets the squids power, to see into the future, and sees that she will marry this man, have a daughter and the daughter dies young of a unmentioned fatal disease.
She CAN change her future, but choices not to. Her husband divorces her because she didn't tell him that she knew his daughter would die young. She has the child and she dies young. She chooses to let these tragedies happen anyway. What a nice person. How about adopting.
And, if she could tell the future AND choose to alter that future....why didn't she see alternatives futures? She just saw the ONE future.
And why add the military angle; bombing the squid space craft?
Yeh, what a probing intellectual piece of dog dung.

There is a lot of bought hype behind this movie but many of you can save yourself the aggravation of watching a bad movie and order ' Interstellar' instead. That is a truly fantastic movie with a big budget featuring top notch writing and great acting performances. Quite frankly I don't think Amazon should even be selling this movie because within 5 minutes of watching it I already had that sinking feeling I'd been had and yet I soldiered on to the inevitable bad movie ending. I could not believe how horrible this movie was. At least half the movie was shot in the dark to save money on sets, lighting and retakes. The screenplay could have been written by a child. I won't get into spoilers not that it would matter but please save yourself the time, money and frustration and avoid this disaster !

Perhaps the worst cinematography I have seen in many a day.
Couldn't they afford a couple of light bulbs?

What started as an interesting film eventually turned into moronic nonsense. It's the type movie of that college professors watch and hope to enjoy (because peers did ((they didn't really but had to prove how intellectual they are))). Uugh.
It's just bad. The best first contact film is still 2001, and will be for a long time.

I'm almost 70 and when I look back at my life it's like everything about it was talking to my future self, knowing how things were going to turn out, like destiny or fate. Back then I was just living it, but now I see the culmination, inevitability, and necessity of it all and how I was meant to reach this point of awareness. This movie is about that phenomenon. So, it describes a life's truth that I don't think you can appreciate without having experienced it. That means that the average individual will struggle with trying to interpret what they've seen, based on their own life's experience, which probably won't encompass the whole message being communicated here. I found this movie very interesting, educational even, without being very entertaining. It's certainly not on a par with "2001: A Space Odessey", which was captivating, engrossing, compelling, mind-boggling, and grand in scope and intensity; not even close.

At first I thought the movie was a bit slow, although that isn't a problem to me. As the movie went, I realized it was just handing out clues, one right after another, but you had to be patient to notice.

If what you want is action, this isn't your movie. If what you want is understanding, I think you'll enjoy it.

I adore Jeremy Renner but he was wasted in this film. He did an amazing job, as always, but his role, while pivotal, wasn't very large. At least, not as far as screen time, presence, and dialogue. I'm impressed to see him taking the back seat to a female lead. Although really, that shouldn't surprise me. He seems like a good guy, along with being a good actor, who isn't threatened by not being the focus of a film.

It's getting a 4 only because of a few places where they took shortcuts they shouldn't have taken. I'm sure there's a lot of good stuff on the cutting room floor, I just wish it had made it into the movie.

What a great teacher....I Am a Death Experiencer Oct. '92 while battling a fatal tumor..happened to be in the hospital when I died for 14mins. I so related to Louise meeting a different consciousness and having life experiences come strongly into the mix resulting in greater understanding & increasing intelligence as well as Connectedness beyond what we could imagine until something occurs that opens the flood gates and pours in such understandings Wisdoms & knowledge. I refer to myself as a Life Puzzle Master. Those who love to get puzzles & put them together....I do this with life...when Reading for People or translating what is happening at the time.....what is truly going on that gov'ts & media's do not want us knowing, etc, etc. This movie you will not want to leave it for a moment....hanging on to every bit of it...the mind riveting in absorbing what the movie is conveying. The movie is also fortelling of what the ruling elites are planning for us concerning their fake alien invasion..they will block ppl from buying guns...that is what occurred in the movie. So if you are familiar w/the 9 11 backtracking to so many movies, the simpsons, family guy, etc where it shows the world trade center buildings & date...you will pick up info like this in Arrival. I absolutely recommend watching this movie....I will be ordering the DVD...I loved every bit of this movie. Also....I encourage to read James Redfields book The Celestine Prophecy....things hit so well in what his book teaches....why things happened the way they do and how to take advantage of them when they happen so you will benefit the way Your Angels are wanting you to. All fits so well together...how I love it when all the pieces come together & one can see the MUCH BIGGER PICTURE....!

This is one of those rare movies that is subtle, engrossing, well written, and just in every way exactly what great science fiction should be. It doesn't go out of its way to pander, to point out how clever it is (one of the brilliant choices that just pays off so well with its reveal), or be the choppily edited ridiculously paced action thriller that has turned films in a thick morass of rotting sameness. That being said, like anything brilliant it does have its points that a nitpicker could take issue with. Forced exposition, inconsistent logic, etc. Note that none of these is a showstopper or even diminishes the enjoyment of it slightly, but there are plenty of interesting things that aren't explored as a result. One that occurred to me even well before the reveal- precisely why is it on the humans to figure out how to communicate? Sure, it's a great plot driver, but objectively it makes little sense. Ignoring the fact that the aliens should know precisely how to communicate with humans given the nature of their existence (learning from events not yet even in motion is a direct plot conceit in this movie after all), how are humans better able to bridge and adapt to alien com munition/thinking well before the prepared and much more advanced aliens do so? They not only have clear technological advantages, but unlike us they had an opportunity to study ahead. They knew they were coming to Earth. They could sit back, do research, listen to our TV and radio. Why would an advanced species have so much more of a difficult time comprehending our way of thinking than vice versa? It's a plot-driven notion of human exceptionalism that is a conceit of nearly every sci fi movie franchise, true, but that doesn't make it any more logical.

So, I'm not one of those people who didn't give this movie a great review because I didn't understand it, or didn't enjoy the complexity. That doesn't change the fact that this was the equivalent of a mid-level Outer Limits episode, but with a big budget and one hour too long.
My biggest issue was the illogical way in which the so-called scientists went about their study. Although (later) it was revealed that the aliens don't "deal well with our algebra," I personally might have tried teaching them stuff like "this is one, this is two" instead of jumping right into "hi, I'm Louise."
Also (spoiler alert) did nobody catch that the alien told Louise that she already had the present/gift/whatever, (which she was then able to use) so that kind of contradicts the whole "you only have 1/12 of it and need to work with all of humanity to complete it" message of unity that I thought this movie was supposed to be all about.

I understand that the aliens were incidental and used as a way to convey the underlying meaning of the movie (the true movement of time) but it was a complete waste of mine watching this

A thought provoking movie... I think the "slowness" other reviewers have complained about, especially compared to the action packed nature of other such films, is in fact very appropriate here.... the nature of the "gift" revealed to the lead character is experiential and exists outside of linear time. We all have the capacity to develop this gift but it is most often a slow process and so unfamiliar to our left brain oriented culture.

Others have referred to this as a "sci-fi chick flick"....so I'm guessing it was a male reviewer who hasn't yet begun to hone this gift or trust his "inner knowing" and intuitive, right brain "feminine side". At any rate our perception and experience of time in this 3D realm is changing and may eventually surpass the need for spoken language because it can no longer express the new reality we will eventually be moving into. There are a growing number of intuitives that already perceive the fluidity of the 'future' and the 'past' and travel easily in these nonlinear realms.
And that would be my only criticism of this movie....that it is already outdated by the shear number of people who have been developing the "gift" and have already pierced the superficial construct we call "time".

Absolutely excellent serious science fiction film, one that that is thoughtful, doesn’t rely on fast paced action, explosions (there is one explosion I will admit), battle sequences, or anything of the sort. Not that there is anything wrong with that and if you look at the other films I reviewed on Amazon, those are certainly movies I enjoy. _Arrival_ was intellectual, a film that thrilled you with the excitement of making discoveries, of figuring things out, of rooms full of smart people at the top of their game confronting a true mystery. It is also an arty, beautiful movie that science fiction elements aside, is a good film, with great acting, immersive photography and music, with superb writing when it comes to the human element, and as vast and mysterious and important as the first contact element is, very much has something to say about the human condition, on the nature of loss, memory, time, and on the lives of one particular family.

The movie centers primarily on a world renown linguist, Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams in for me personally the finest role I have ever seen her perform), tasked with communicating with aliens, mysterious somewhat squid-like beings that have arrived on impressive monolithic star craft, each hovering in a specific spot and ready to receive human visitors. There are twelve of them, and Louise is recruited along with physicist Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremey Renner who can really act) by U.S. Army Colonel Weber (played by Forest Whitaker) to head up science and linguist teams to study the aliens at the craft in Montana.

Louise, out of all the teams in different countries in the world, makes the most strides in communicating with the aliens (dubbed heptapods), occasionally having to overcome skepticism and caution by her superiors as well as the physical and mental challenges of communicating with the aliens. As a secondary plot the Chinese government starts to see the aliens as hostile and appears to be planning an attack on them, with Louise and Ian rushing to understand the heptapod language, why they are here, and to convince the Chinese to stand down (while the American government is ready to end the talks and perhaps join the Chinese in an attack).

Interspersed with the first contact events we learn Louise had a daughter named Hannah, who while having a wonderful childhood and a great mother-daughter connection, died at age 12 from an incurable illness (something you learn very early on in the film). The combination of eternal love for Hannah, happy memories of Hannah’s life, and lingering sadness at her death color much of Louise’s thoughts and her actions (and to my surprise tied in to an astonishing degree to what the heptapods offered).

I liked also how they didn’t just say Louise was a linguist and she magically could understand the heptapod’s language. She was shown with Ian’s help puzzling out how they spoke and thought, the viewer getting the frustration as well as the eureka moments, and also the fact Louise was a linguist, how she saw the world, through languages and understanding how someone’s language structures the reality around them was brilliant.

No complaints about the film! If you like serious science fiction, beautiful science fiction, science fiction that doesn’t forget the human element and doesn’t forget the science part, or a film that doesn’t really have red herrings, that ultimately everything ties together, I highly recommend this film.

My rating is more of a 4.5

Arrival is a 2016 American science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer. he film follows a linguist enlisted by the United States Army to discover how to communicate with extraterrestrial aliens who have arrived on Earth, before tensions lead to war.

Perhaps some due credit should be given to the source material; ‘Arrival’ is based on a short story called "Story of Your Life" by an author named Ted Chiang. A faithful adaptation, ‘Arrival’ follows its predecessor rather closely and doesn't change too much about the plot for the sake of making it more entertaining or dramatic. Surprisingly, they complex parts in this novel (IE: The advancement of the language) tare compartmentalised and simplified in ‘Arrival’, but this in no way changes the substance of the story or the themes and values it takes into deep consideration. I applaud Denis Villeneuve in making accommodations for his target audience - people that aren't likely to be a linguist related experts - Without doing so at the cost of the depth embraces by Chiang in his own writing.

This isn't your regular science fiction movie, and when I say that I mean there is a large amount of action or explosions meant to keep one engaged. I would almost say that there are parts that are rather boring, but these are leveled out with scenes that are defined by some amount of sophistication and curiosity being salvaged amongst a pile of metaphorical rubble. All that is overt is obscured by some amount of mystery that consistently hangs in the background, and this alone provides some amount of suspense that is naturally alluring. ‘Arrival’’s pace is reminiscent of a phrase associated with Goldilocks…...it isn’t too fast...and it isn’t too slow….it’s just right.

Underneath the surface of ‘Arrival’ is a trove of themes that are endlessly waiting to be explored and marinated in. The implication that all that is foreign is dangerous (and should be treated as such) is deeply reflective of policies affected and created from biases that have this very juvenile and unwavering prejudice at its core. Moreover, it is even more powerful that the sheer willingness - not desire - to compromise and treat foreign entities with kindness does more to help the main character on her mission than any amount of manpower or violence. Perhaps even most importantly, ‘Arrival’ resonates with viewers and leaves them wondering how they would potentially change the way they live if given some amount of insight regarding the future.

I would recommend!
(And I’m not even super big on science-fiction movies!)

Read the reviews on Amazon. Read the reviews on Wikipedia. Bought the DVD. This movie cannot be considered entertainment by any stretch of the imagination. The only word I can think of to describe the director and producers is hubris.

12 alien ships arrive distributed around the globe. So to establish communication the heroine holds up a placard with her name on it - in English characters. Not basic symbols, but her name in block letters. The illogic continues to increase. The plot with its opaque flashbacks is incoherent.

Well over half of the scenes are so dark I could barely discern the actions, even with my TV brightness maxed out. At critical points dialog is so quiet it is not intelligible.

If the production staff had spent less on cocaine and more on professionalism and production values, and a rewrite of the script, this could possibly have been a B movie.

I normally like to buy DVDs where I've already seen the film and that comes with good extras, but lately, I've purchased a few that were movies I'd never seen before. This DVD was on sale for under $3. I do like good sci-fi and drama, so figured I'd give it a shot. The DVD actually doesn't feature any extras of note. It has a decent DVD case, but that's about it and that's why I give it an average '3' rating.

As for the movie, perhaps it was just over my head. At first I thought they were showing flashbacks, but it's really more of a flash forward situation, premonitions so to speak. There were some great moments when they were getting into the meat of the drama, but they just as easily could have named this movie: Breathing. If you like star Amy Adams breathing audibly, alot, then you'll like the movie. There are long segments where, whether wearing a hazmat suit or just in normal attire, all you hear is Adams' breathing. No one else does that, not even in their hazmats. She just breathes and breathes, and every time I thought they were done with that, she'd do it again.

I'd call this an intellectual film, like Contact. You really have to be able to understand what is going on and how they get from A to B. My understanding is that they actually created a full linear language for the alien race depicted. That was interesting, but difficult for a non-intellectual like me to follow fully.

For most of the movie, I found myself thinking it was a mix of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For the former, it's the alien race who lands ships all over the globe and no one knows why. Then it ebbs into Close Encounters, the extended ending where Dreyfuss goes into the ship to try to take it all in. Most of the movie is in this mode, getting inside and trying to learn to communicate with the aliens. For a brief moment, I thought we were going to get a slice of Independence Day, the battle moment, but that didn't actually happen.

So, average DVD in terms of presentation. The story is intriguing, but too slow for me at times, times when all you get is Amy Adams breathing, or sometimes we just watch her staring. She stares a lot and sometimes she's staring and breathing. The key word in the movie is "weapon" and what that turns out to be is a novel idea that I like, but again, maybe this movie is a little over my head because I'm not an intellectual and I think that's who it's made for.

I'm glad I didn't pay more than $3 for it and if I had to do it again, I wouldn't. Intellectuals or high concept folks, though, may love this movie, along with people who like to listen to Amy Adams breathe, stare, breathe again, stare again, and breathe some more.

This may be one of the best offerings on Prime in a long time. I loved this story of appreciating life and accepting the good with the bad. Of not being afraid to live or making the wrong choices. The movie wants to tell you that all parts of your life are beautiful, even the ugly and painful ones. Why is it that when someone leaves us, either by death or by choice, we only remember the last thing that happened? Why not live in the time enjoyed?

That said, this film is not without flaws. It's visually dark. Forest Whitaker tries to pull a weird accent. And as for the "twist," I'm not sure what people are talking about. I knew pretty early on what was going on with the time concept and who would be involved. I don't see the point of the movie to be a twist, but rather a coming together. It's hard to explain. It's like a circle that makes sense at every point.

A circle. Like the universal language in the story. The written characters make me think of Zen's enso, or circle. Think about life in terms of circles instead of lines (time lines, lines of print) like you do now. Then you'll get it. When you travel completely around a circle, you are arriving again.