The Arrival

"This is a sub-par Science Fiction movie made in Charlie Sheen's better days. It is a bit low budget, but still at least worth one watch."

"I just watched this for the first time in at least 20 years. Not all that surprisingly, I didn’t care for this as much as I did when I first watched it. Oh well."

"Not bad. Pretty good."

"- The story plays like a glorified X-Files episode stretched out to nearly two hours long. The style is very bland, relying on a lot of quick cuts and closeups to tell the story. The colors are muted throughout, the sets design for some key scenes look cheap and uninspired, and the visual effects are badly aged. The sound mix is obnoxiously loud, something I didn't come across very much in other alien movies of that time. I don't think Charlie Sheen is a good actor or a very charismatic presence on screen, so having him carry the movie with his flat line delivery got old really fast. There were times in the movie when I wondered how this movie would have benefited from a director like Guillermo del Toro and a more thoughtful lead like Guy Pearce or Johnny Depp. Maybe Lou Diamond Phillips. As it is the production and casting (with the exception of Teri Polo and Ron Silver) were too bland to highlight the otherwise smart story and some well made suspenseful scenes. + The story itself was decent. Though I prefer the thoughtful approach of Contact with Jodi Foster, this movie did a better job with presenting the science jargon in a more digestible way by framing it into the immediacy of a suspense thriller. These aliens aren't benevolent, and as an X-Files kind of story I liked the simplicity of what they were doing. It raises the stakes and is kind of believable in its own way. Overall: Intriguing story that is visually bland, too loud at times, and miscast. See Contact for a more thoughtful alien movie, Dark City for an alien mystery thriller, or The X-Files TV show and even one-off movies."

"2/20"