It is through this subversion of our own language that I became unshackled from time. You get the alien story told in first person past tense and then memories start with “I remember” and continue in present tense and conditional tense (instead of pluperfect tense which is the usual marker of going backward in time from the forward action in storytelling). The short story proceeds along a traditional structural route of a protagonist remembering two things from the past, the first alien contact and what we come to learn is the memory of the pre-knowledge gained by the protagonist. We know before the first section break/memory that the first alien contact happened before the child was born. The short story is more straightforward about the order of Louise's experiences. It unifies the experience of body and mind and cosmos inside the form and language of the Heptapods. The movie, of course, goes even further because it makes it a physical (as in physics) reality. There’s more simultaneity than we believe. We cast our minds into the future to try to guess what might happen next. Time wears on our individual bodies in a linear way-we age, but our emotional and mental experience of time is not chronological. I left the movie feeling like I had just seen a story that gave a fairly accurate depiction of how humans actually experience time. Their written language exists multidimensionally and the dimension modifies the meaning (this is made more clear in the short story than the film). The Heptapods are alien creatures who don’t experience time linearly but rather simultaneously. We don’t even suspect that the order of events is a mystery until we start learning about a new way to experience time. Humans are hardwired, through our languages, to linear chronological thinking and the movie lets us stay there until it doesn’t. The movie uses our own preconceived notions about how time, particularly story-time, works. We are left to assume that the child of Arrival’s protagonist, Louise Banks, has died and then the forward action of the movie starts. The film does not clarify, and I would suggest it actively muddies, the precise location in time of the movie’s opening. The adaptation by Eric Heisserer is faithful to certain intents of Chiang's story but there are plot elements that move the film that are not present in the story. Spoilers ahead.įor me watching the movie didn’t spoil the story (but the reading the story first will ruin one of the good sleights of hand for the movie). With the short story, I fell in love with the idea of where the notion of free will exists in a much larger concept of the universe. I came out of the movie feeling elated at having experienced a more real feeling of how we actually experience time. I loved both the movie and the story but for different reasons. I'll take it both ways, please - Gemma Webster
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