spoilers ahead I felt like the character conflict arcs were contrived and ultimately the idea of learning a language makes you a pre-cog fell flat for me. In science fiction, the big idea goes ‘woo!’ or the characters go ‘woo!’ but in the case of Arrival, nothing really went ‘woo!’
But maybe I’m wrong - what was I missing about Arrival?
Hmm, I think to deserve the label of “one of the best” you need to appeal to a very large audience. For me it was certainly one of the best, if not the actual best - I struggle to think of a scifi film that I thought was better. Scifi has so many subgenres…Serenity has a huge amount of nostalgia attached to it but it really wasn’t as good as Firefly. The Dark Knight was also incredible, but here it’s apples and oranges.
Anyway.
I adored the “first contact” scenes…and I loved that the point of the first contact was, in a sense, to force an intra-species first contact of sorts. What if the most unknown sapient beings in the universe to us live on the same planet as ourselves? kinda deal. I would go with octopi in that premise, but having it be countries we’re not allied with is an even cooler take.
As for the daughter plot - ehh, it was fine. Made the story more personal. I thought the romance was fine, because it gave some clues so you could figure out who the father was and what is going on with the timeline. “Ask your father, he’s the scientist,” etc.
But if you’re going with “one of the best scifi movies” I think you have to qualify it as like, “one of the best intellectual scifi moves.” Because “scifi” has really come more to mean either (a) superheroes or (b) space opera when it comes to movies, imo. If I hear “scifi” with zero qualifications I’m expecting Marvel or Star Trek/Wars.
Does the best mean you need to appeal to a very large audience?
For me best & most popular are two very different concepts. By your metric, modern pop music is obviously the best music?
It’s an interesting question, and part of what makes it interesting is the historical rating we give to things. e.g. operas & classical music from 300 years ago have stood the test of time in a really shockingly impressive manner. Most of modern pop music will be forgotten completely in 50 years just as we’ve forgotten the majority of what music was popular 50 years ago.
So maybe instead you can ask:
And the thing is, for Arrival, I think the answer is no…it would be too boring and perhaps a bit too confusing. But within its niche absolutely the answer to (probably both) questions is yes.
Also, I’ve now remembered. My favorite scifi movie of the century is probably Primer.