Arrival (2016)

It is time.  This month the Kline-Woodman's are doing what most movie aficionados do throughout the year passively, but we find ourselves in the position of having to do it all at once, and that is watch as many of the Oscar nominated movies as we can manage.  So many movie reviews this month, I am afraid.   To complicate things more, I was in China for the first two weeks of the season, so it is short short short.
This is the first (well, we had managed to watch something ahead of time, but not much, so this feels like the start.   It is a non-linear movie that is the opposite of fast faced.  It is almost in an alternative time lapse place.  Aliens land on earth in 12 separate places and they communicate in a language that no one can understand.  Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a linguist who convinces the military that she is the one to crack the code, and she does so with the help of a physicist, Ian Donelly (Jeremy Renner).  They work diligently and respectfully with the aliens, in contrast to the military response, and when international communication breaks down and the widespread feeling is that they should be obliterated, Louise works with the alien and his knowledge of her gift for future seeing to come up with a viable strategy for the win.  Well conceived story and enjoyable if somewhat unconventional movie.