Arrival — it's fucked up
Spoilers ahead.
A lot of people seem to think that Arrival is a "great" SF film. Now, bear in mind, there are virtually no "great" SF films. 2001, for example, is a bore with a terrible ending. Blade Runner had a terrible voice over, but is incomprehensible without it (or the memory of it). Alien has no glaring flaws, but it's far less ambitious — it's a monster movie on a spaceship and they don't fuck up anything badly. It seems that the most we can expect from a SF movie is to have our thoughts provoked and then be profoundly disappointed as all the horrible inconsistencies and holes become obvious.
Am I being unfair on SF? No, in the sense that there are plenty of non SF movies that don't fuck up the way every SF movie seems to. Yes, in the sense that SF movies are vulnerable to whole new categories of fuck-up that no other movies have to worry about. No, in the sense that Joss Whedon seems to have been able to avoid these kinds of fuckups in an action-comedy teen vampire show.
What kind of fuck-up am I whining about?
WTF?!?! First of all, there's direct internal inconsistency. X = Y and X ≠Y. Let's consider Blade Runner (which I consider the best SF movie ever made) — a setting in which replicants are so hard to tell from humans that an elaborate empathy test is required to detect them and yet they can casually stick their hands into boiling water, or walk around in a cryogenic facility without much clothing, without getting burned.
Wait, what?!?! Next, there's transitive inconsistency. X = A. Y = A. X ≠Y. The Federation has a device that can transport stuff onto a target light years away traveling at warp speed that has its shields on. The Federation has enemies it's worried about. Wait, what?
But, but, but… Then there's inconsistencies between the imagined setting and the real world as we know it.