Movie Review: Arrival (2016)

Pretty good!  Considering that it came out last December you've probably heard all about it, but on the off chance that you need a refresher trailer, here you go:

OK, got all that?  Moving along then, it's a greatly expanded adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story Story of Your Life from the collection Stories of Your Life and Others.  All too frequently "adaptations" of decent sci-fi tales lose the original's meaning and veer off into space-cruisers-and-pew-pew territory.  Somehow, they got this one right, fleshing out the original short to be even more poignant as well as feature-film length.  Overall a very good job.  If the trailer appeals to you at all, you'll probably like this one.  
Three and three quarters stars out of four.

BTW, from an interview with Chiang in this collection, he talks about how he writes:

Typically the first part of the story that I write is the very ending, either the last paragraph of the story or a paragraph near the end.  Once I have the destination in mind then I can build the rest of the story around that or build the rest of the story in such a way as to lead up to that.  Usually the second thing I write is the opening of the story and then I write the rest of the story in almost random order.  I just keep writing scenes until I've connected the beginning and the end.  I write the key scenes or what I think of as the landmark scenes first, and then I just fill in backwards and forwards.

Hmm.  After you watch the movie, re-read that paragraph and you'll say "hmm" too.