What is it with YouTube lists of science fiction movies. Every other choice is some incredibly unwatchable movie!
Already you can tell I didn’t like this movie. And that is an understatement. I despised it.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
The movie starts out with us meeting the protagonist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams). We see her with her daughter Hannah starting with her as a newborn and progressing with her as an adolescent dying of what appears to be cancer.
Switch scenes and Amy is teaching a class in Portuguese language at a university but just then the world finds out that twelve alien spacecraft have landed in different areas of the Earth and Amy is needed by the US government to figure out the aliens’ language and find out what they want. Her contact is Colonel Weber (played by Forest Whitaker). Louise is teamed with a scientist, Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) to solve the mystery of why the aliens are on Earth.
There’s a lot of hand-waving (literally) but eventually Louise takes off her quarantine suit so they can see her pretty hair and slowly but surely, she translates the language of the aliens; heptapods which are represented as some kind of hyperintelligent cephalopods that spell out words with their ink (seriously!).
Through misunderstanding the difference between the words for tool and weapon, all of the major military powers come to believe that the aliens are attempting to start a war by providing some kind of advanced weapons to all of them separately. Rogue American soldiers even try to blow up the heptapods and Louise is almost killed.
But just as the world is about to attack the heptapods and cause an interstellar incident Louise reenters the ship and has a magical epiphany and can understand everything the heptapods are saying. She finds out the tool they are giving humanity is their language which if studied allows the user to see the future and experience time as “non-linear.”
Louise then is able to see into the future and know something that will convince the Chinese leader not to attack the heptapods and save the day. Then we find out that Louise’s daughter Hannah didn’t die in the past but is going to be born to Louise and Ian in the future. And apparently Louise is accepting of this future tragedy including the fact that Ian will leave her when he finds out she conceived Hannah regardless of knowing she will be doomed to an early death. The End.
How do I hate this movie? Let me count the ways. This movie epitomizes the “girl boss” stereotype. Louise is the omnicompetent protagonist who can do seemingly anything needed without any rational explanation for her abilities. Everyone else is always stumped but she always finds a way. And it’s always ridiculous. The military are always arrogant, murderously enraged and completely incompetent. And the action of the movie is non-existent. The highlight of the film is Louise writing the word “LOUISE” on a white board and holding it up for the heptapods to see. I’m not kidding. And then in the last five minutes of the movie Louise figures out all of that stuff and we live happily ever after (except for her daughter dying of cancer). This movie sucks.