It's Time You Watched—Or Rewatched—This Amazing Movie: Arrival

Arrival is a thought-provoking 2016 science fiction movie that explores language, time, and the profound implications of how we communicate.

I’m going to pause and let you ponder those last three words for a moment: how we communicate.

Now, I’m going to pause again… and let you ponder the two words in bold. They both refer to time, and by extension, they influence how you think.

If you haven’t seen the film, here’s the basic idea. When twelve mysterious alien ships land around the world, expert linguist Louise Banks is recruited by the U.S. military to decipher the extraterrestrials’ language. As she learns to understand the aliens—called Heptapods—she begins to experience time in a nonlinear way, unlocking insights that blur the boundaries between past, present, and future.

The film stars Amy Adams as Dr. Banks, Jeremy Renner as physicist Ian Donnelly, Forest Whitaker as Colonel Weber, Michael Stuhlbarg as Agent Halpern, and Tzi Ma as General Shang (who has a small but pivotal role).

Over the weekend, I rewatched Arrival and also reread Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story Story of Your Life, from which the film was adapted. The movie diverges from the story in several ways—adding geopolitical tension and offering a more cinematic emotional arc—but both are brilliant in their own right.

What fascinates me most isn’t the spaceships or alien technology; it’s that as Dr. Banks learns the Heptapods’ language, the structure of her thoughts—and thus her experience of time—changes. It’s not an external technology that allows her to shift through time; it’s an internal reorganization of perception, enabled by language.

This possibility alone stretches a fictional work towards a reality-shifting tool. Can language actually have such a profound effect? Some human languages already reflect radically different conceptions of time. Here are a few:

• Hopi (Native American language):
  Hopi doesn’t divide time into past, present, and future like English. Instead, it distinguishes between events that are manifest or unmanifest. Time is not a flowing line; it’s a reflection of what is or is not real… yet.

• Quechua (Andean language):
  In Quechua, the past is referred to as “in front” of you—because it’s visible and known—and the future is “behind” you, because it’s hidden. The logic flips our usual metaphors on their head.

• Australian Aboriginal languages (e.g. Yolŋu, Arrernte):
  Many Aboriginal Australians describe time through Dreamtime, a concept in which ancestral events exist in an eternal present. Time is cyclical, spiritual, and interwoven with land and identity.

In Arrival, the message is subtle but seismic: the way we think—the words and metaphors we use—shapes the way we experience time, reality, and even love. It’s not just about understanding others. It’s about expanding what it means to be human.