Arrival

It's not everyday that a sci-fi film gets nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, so I had to check out Arrival to see what made it so special.  Sure enough, it was excellent, with a great production design, fabulous cinematography, a trio of top of the line actors, clever non-linear story telling (which ties nicely into the plot, but if you haven't seen it yet, I won't say more than that), and, above all, a story that is as relatable as they come, despite being about communicating with aliens to prevent the world tearing itself apart.
For those of you that don't know, Arrival explores one of the most overlooked facets of space travel - communication.  Most science fiction takes place in a galaxy with universal translators or babel fish or where there's been enough space travel that everyone's adopted a universal language or, my favorite, when the aliens go all Pocahontas and become fluent in English after just moments of exposure to the language.  I've always enjoyed episodes like Darmok from Star Trek TNG that explore the difficulty of communicating with an alien race, but I also understand that isn't usually practical.  Can you imagine if every episode of Star Trek was a two parter, with the first part being just trying to understand the local language and the second part telling the actual story.  More realistic, probably.  More entertaining, certainly not.
So, it's nice when we're treated to a more in depth exploration of what communication between two alien species might look like.  Especially interesting is the fact that the two species in Arrival (humans and heptapods) can't physically make the sounds that are required to communicate verbally, so they're forced to resort to writing.  The heptapods writing looks like a ring left by a paper cup that you accidently set in some ink, and includes a complete thought in each character, rather than a single sound or word like earth languages.  It's visually captivating and surprisingly gripping trying to follow the processes of drawing out understanding of earth writing and translating the new language, but beneath it all, Arrival is setting up the audience to ask some of the most serious questions of humanity.
As with many sci-fi film, we get to see that humanity is far less trusting of the unknown than we'd probably like to be.  Several franchises have suggested that an alien visit would unite humanity, but Arrival suggests that each country will want to be the one that takes the right action, so, though we may attempt to cooperate at first, it may not take long before every one has decided their approach is best and shut themselves off from the rest of the world.  The most interesting question however, relates to flashes we receive of our main character struggling with the death of her daughter.  The central question of the film is, if you could see all the pain that will be part of you future, would you change anything to avoid it if you could also see all the joy?  The films makes the case that we would still choose to live the hardest moments of our life if we knew the trade off was losing the most joyous moments of our life.  What do you think, would you be willing to suffer the worst of your life if you could relive the best?  I know I would.
Well, to sum up, Arrival is a thought provoking and visually rich film which definitely merits a viewing.  I'll leave it up to you whether you purchase it, as it's not necessarily something you'll want to watch over and over again, but it will be a film that sticks with you, so even one viewing should certainly be worthwhile.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.