Arrival transcends the limitations that so often govern the less creative examples of the subgenre, instead using it as a loose conceptual foundation upon which to build a theoretically-informed examination of what precisely ... makes us human.

Arrival couldn't have arrived (pun intended) at a better time.

I think of Arrival in terms of color: the milky grays of the clouds rolling over the Montana plain; the bright blue of computer screens bouncing off the gray tents on the makeshift army compound.

This is atypical science fiction that, ironically, only knows how to communicate in a language we already understand.