What’s up with that part when Louise goes into the foggy part of the spaceship by herself, after the explosion? We're heading back in to see it again, but let us know what you are thinking in the comments section below. Just watched Arrival.

Costello tells Louise that in 3,000 years, the aliens will need humans’ help with some unspecified crisis, which is why they visited Earth in the first place, to teach humans Heptapod B. Most likely, the aliens chose different locations around the world to include as wide a variety of human cultures as possible. http://jenellegloria.blogspot.com/2016/11/metaphysics-of-arrival.html. At the end of the movie, Louise says she realizes why her husband left her—or why he will leave her in the future. They are memories of events that haven't yet happened, and Arrival has been showing them to us the entire time in the flashbacks to Louise's daughter, Hannah. By the end of the movie, we learn that heptapod eventually becomes our planet's universal language, and Louise (Amy Adams) has become a master instructor in the language. By that point, Louise has been studying the aliens’ language for weeks, immersing herself and even dreaming in it. A linguist singlehandedly thwarts a world war by time-traveling. It's my understanding that the aliens came to our planet to teach us how to understand heptapod, their circular language and method of communicating. The aliens pump enough breathable air into their ship for humans to survive for two hours at a time (that’s why the humans have to wait on the platform beneath the spaceship for a period of time before entering), but the scientists aren’t taking any chances, so they bring a caged bird with them when they’re on board. Because the aliens themselves don’t experience linear time, their logograms can put words in any order without changing the meaning of the message. The aliens seem to be aware, considering how quickly Costello flees the scene. The bulk of the film focuses on how a human being would react to, and process, the irregular experience of First Contact. Needless to say, this story will be drenched in Arrival spoilers, so bail out now if you haven't yet seen the film. So Louise knows what's going to happen in her life. The rewrite created a more cerebral and philosophical experience that now has the audience creating their own ending and offshoot stories. We don’t know much about the aliens’ atmosphere, except that it’s so different from our own that it takes the aliens 18 hours just for them to reset the human-friendly environment between sessions.

Extroverted introvert. So when Louise is talking to General Shang (Tzi Ma) at that fancy party, she’s basically time traveling?

By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. Production designer Patrice Vermette designed the logograms to be circular, representing how way the aliens think about time cyclically instead of in a straight line.

Costello is also, appropriately, the chattier of the two. The original telling of it had humanity having to work together to to solve the problem.

The movie’s premise revolves around a theory of linguistic relativity called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which proposes that the language we speak reflects or shapes (depending on who you ask) the way we think. You can cancel anytime. In the present day, China is the nation that has decided to attack the alien ships.

Aren't you really only seeing one POSSIBLE translation of a person's timeline? I think they are a unified agent as a species, and want to unify with our own species as well. The names fit nicely with the movie’s themes of miscommunication and linguistic ambiguity—it’s really all just a big, interplanetary rendition of “Who’s on First?”. He understands that on HIS timeline, sharing that information was crucial to Louise being able to change his mind in the past.

Because she knew even before they became a couple that their daughter would eventually die of an unnamed disease. When we were able to interview Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer, he explained to us that the heptapod language was always the toughest element of the story to crack, primarily because it was a difficult language and symbol to convey on screen. When they say 3,000 years to them it's actually seconds or minutes or hours. This particular variety is known as a “bootstrap paradox,” and it can be found in a lot of sci-fi, including Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. What if, before she dies, someone on the other side of the planet discovers a cure to Hannah's disease? And you'll never see this message again. Let's discuss. Just wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything! That's why they added the blurb in the dialog about how your brain rewires when you learn another language. “In war there are no winners, only widows.”. Surely they didn’t come all the way to Earth just to give humans the gift of their language? Resident dad. Are we way off? Like his real-life counterpart, the alien Abbott (who often appears on the left) is actually a little taller and skinnier than Costello. Louise decides that she will, because the moments of bliss that she will have with Hannah far outweigh the pain she will have when she loses her. So here are answers to some of the most pressing questions we had after watching Arrival. Or is it set in stone? But they can't do that until we ourselves are unified. By using our Services or clicking I agree, you agree to our use of cookies. In war there are no winners, only widows. The aliens don't have a notion of what time is.

Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. I don't think that's quite it. Wouldn’t this time-travel scenario create some kind of temporal paradox? Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. I think she just sees HER timeline, and no one elses. And in the future -- like, 3,000 years in the future -- the aliens are going to need mankind's help... for an undetermined issue. Here's where the human, emotional side of Arrival starts to factor in. 18 months into the future, Louise and Shang will meet face-to-face, and he will express gratitude for her work and efforts, which ended up convincing him … The hypothesis, which comes from the work of early 20th-century American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, is already widely disputed in the world of linguistics, but the way the movie uses it is pure science fiction. By gifting Louise with seeing into he future, was she able to detect why they would need humanities help? As Much Analysis As Your System Can Handle. If it stops, they’re in trouble. Why does he leave her? The secret to Arrival ends up being language and communication, the ways that we speak to each other, and the different ways we can translate intent and meaning in words and phrases. Er, not like this. Building off of a dense and complicated short story titled, appropriately, "The Story of Your Life," Arrival casts Amy Adams as a world-renowned linguist trying to figure out why aliens have come to our planet -- before the military blows them to smithereens. She interacted with the heptapods. If the aliens can see the future, then wouldn’t they know that some rogue members of the American military were trying to blow up their ship? Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism. Here's where I disconnect with Arrival, briefly. Being able to read or speak in heptapod means that you are able to see a person's entire timeline -- their entire Life Sentence -- from start to finish. But the other alien, Abbott, nobly sticks around long enough to deliver his part of the message that the aliens came to deliver in the first place. I think the beginning of the movie confused me because of what was said in her prologue. I belive in the original writing of the movie the twelve areas are all given an individual gift of information that when used together harmoniously will create a vessel that can traverse space. What do you think about the discussion points in this feature? Later we learn from Costello that his injuries were fatal (“Abbott is death process”), meaning he sacrificed himself for the cause while still managing to save Ian and Louise. They sure did.

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