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Arrival (2016) - Uncut Version (Patreon)

Published:
2026-06-20 00:35:38
Edited:
2026-06-20 01:21:49
Imported:
2026-08

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  • 684312677.mp4

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Content

Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma

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Comments

Lola Lirola

Guys, I'm a professional translator and a Comparative Linguistics Major, and I'm doing a "translators on film" project over here, so this is so incredibly my jam!!! ...and it's 3 am here in Spain and I can't stay awake, dammit! I have Lots To Say ™️ but I'm sleepy!

Youtalkingtome

Get some sleep! I promise, we will keep the video up! :)

Lola Lirola

😅 I will definitely pester you tomorrow!!

JC

I took some linguistics and philosophy of language courses in college so very excited to see what you think!! I’ve always described this film as a linguistics movie masquerading as sci-fi. It’s easily in my top 5 films of the last 10+ years.

dys

Lola, I remember from your comments that you've been waiting for them to get to this movie for a while. I started college majoring in linguistics before switching to computer science so I only took a couple linguistics courses but I I read and loved the Ted Chiang short story before I even started college and I love this movie.

Jonathan Eaton

YES! I've been waiting for this one. For the Pink Floyd fans out there, after watching it once normal, watch again and start Dark Side of the Moon exactly when they start the movie. Years ago people began saying The Wizard of Oz syncs up with Dark Side of the Moon, but IMO you have to want to see it. But hearing that caused me to begin searching for a movie that did sync up with it. And this movie is the best I've have ever found.

Pam Nail

I usually can't stand the "should have been nominated" discourse, but it feels REALLY egregious that Amy Adams wasn't even nominated for this. I truly think this has been her best role and performance. I remember seeing this in the theater when it came out. It was right after the 2016 election, and you could hear people leaving the theater wondering in horror what would happen if this actually happened in our then-current climate.

Rob Bob

The best film from the last decade, IMO. Every time I watch it, it gets richer in virtually every way. A modern masterpiece.

Rob Bob

I too, hope for a re-release someday! :) 70mm preferably.

Michelle Taylor

The Chinese quote Louise (Amy Adams) speaks to General Shang means: "In war, there are no winners, only widows".The full phrase she delivers during their private phone call translates to: "War does not make heroes, only leaves behind orphans and widows".

Abby T W

I love how many language nerds there are here! I was a linguistics and interpretation major who is no longer in that field, but I’ve always been fascinated by languages and how languages change our brains! This is in my top 5 favorite movies ever; the way they really deliver an incredibly heartfelt and nuanced portrait of love and loss and humanity via linguistics and aliens (I mean what a crazy pitch meeting this must have been!!) is just masterful. I tell people all the time that when someone doesn’t “get” linguistics, I always say just watch this movie. So glad you loved it! And Kevin, that is the fastest I have ever seen someone pick up on the themes and catch the twist. I was flabbergasted! You two are always very savvy viewers, but I could really tell you had some knowledge of linguistics :) Thank you for watching this one!!

Jeff

I absolutely LOVE this movie, and I don't say that about many movies. The directing and editing is genius, and of course the overall theme is so moving. I never expected a science-fiction film to leave me in tears, but it is so much more than that. I'm so glad you guys finally saw it, and I really enjoyed watching your faces as you realized what was going on. Rewatching this only deepens the experience every time.

Yannick, from Montréal

Thank you so much for doing this one "on your own" I'm going to give a bunch of tidbits about filming locations, being from Québec myself. The scenic lakeside home where Louise (Amy Adams) lives and remembers her daughter is located in L'Île-Cadieux, just west of Montreal. The University where Louise teaches is the Université de Montréal. Filming took place on the main campus, including the Décelles Building for classrooms, the parking garage, and the HEC Montréal auditorium. The Banquet Hall, and the interiors of the United Nations banquet at the end of the film were shot inside the Place des Arts performing arts center. Scenes set in the hospital regarding Hannah's birth and illness were filmed at Santa Cabrini Hospital. Soundstages: Much of the military base, the tent interiors, and the alien spacecraft interior were constructed on soundstages at Mels Studios in Montreal The Montana military camp and the site where the massive shell hovers above the ground were filmed on rural farmlands in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region, primarily in the Saint-Fabien area (about 5h drive from Montréal)

Clare Manion

Ok, so... I majored in Linguistics, and I'll probably do multiple notes, so I apologize in advance. First - yes, the opening is brutal. Second - Military officials asking the college professor to translate based on two audio clips is laughable. I'm convinced that was in the script solely to illustrate the complexity of the problem to an otherwise unfamiliar audience. For context - the capstone course for Linguistics majors at UW Madison (me) was 'Field Studies'. The professor brought in a guest that was a native speaker of a language that no one in the class spoke. We could ask questions in English, but they were only allowed to answer in their native language. Split into 5 groups, each concentrating on a different level of language (phonetics, phonology, lexicography, morphology, syntax), we spent THE ENTIRE SEMESTER reverse engineering the mystery language, and only ever scratched the surface. (My year, it was 'Southern Min', a dialect spoken in Taiwan and pockets in southeast Asia. My one paltry contribution was that the language did not include 'verbal aspect'. I won't bore you with the details.)

Clare Manion

Hilariously, in another senior course, we tried to decipher Potawatomi (an Algonquin language, similar to Ojibwe) from the hand-written notes a part-time linguist and non-native speaker...Unfortunately he had terrible handwriting...And he changed his orthographic conventions several years in...so the difficulty was multiplied 🙃

dys

I highly recommend reading the Ted Chiang short story this is based on, "Story of Your Life" (which frankly I think is a way better title than "Arrival"). The movie expands on a lot of stuff and it is a fantastic adaptation of the short story, but I think the biggest way the movie deviates from its source is that in the story, learning the Heptapods' language doesn't give her time superpowers, it just changes her *perception* of time so she doesn't experience a difference between present past and future. In the story she wouldn't have been able to tell the Chinese general something she learned in the future, and the Heptapods would not have been able to tell her they would need humans' help in 3000 years. In fact in the story her daughter died in a preventable accident not an inevitable disease, it's just that to her experience that might as well be happening at the same time as her interactions with the aliens. Her learning their language doesn't change physics, it just changes the way her mind works. Lola asked me in the comments on the poll this movie won if I preferred the movie or the story, and I do love this movie, but I love the story more for how much it breaks my brain trying to imagine what it would be like perceiving reality that way. Not an original thought for me, some youtube video said this very well, but *man* Villenueve is just the best at conveying a sense of scale in film. The first thing I saw Michael Stuhlbarg in that I actually noted him as an actor was Dopesick, playing one of the Sacklers. He was chilling in that performance, great show. Great performance by Michael Keaton as well (of course, as always) but also introduced me to Kaitlyn Dever as a massive, massive talent. Going by George from Cinebinge's reaction to this movie, Amy Adams' Chinese is basically unintelligible.

Yannick, from Montréal

I always wanted to analyze the movie from when Louise starts seeing her "future daughter" It's right after she comes back from the real "First Contact", when they name them Abbott and Costello. It's quite earlier than I expected.

Ben Gilbert

The movie's based on the Ted Chiang novella Story of Your Life which won a Nebula Award.

Benjamin Finkel

This is such a crucial and important point for the film. I both love and hate that they didn't subtitle it.

Pam Nail

The score was by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who did scores for several of Villeneuve's films. But it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars because it heavily uses a pre-existing piece ("On the Nature of Daylight -- the violin piece that plays in the beginning and at the end). The Academy thought people would be influenced by the previously existing piece when judging the merits of the actual score.

Benjamin Finkel

Easily one of the best Sci-Fi films of all time and a top 10 all time movie. I love this one, and have watched so many reactions to it. Two things I want to highlight: 1. Almost no one understands the "canary in the coalmine" bit. I'm not that old I don't know why people don't know what that is. I'm so glad you did. 2. My favorite part of reactions to this movie is watching for when they figure out the time shenanigans. It's a great thing to see on someone's face. You figured it out so much earlier than anyone I've seen. I pointed at Kevin's face on the video when the "zero sum game" reveal happened and we could see you figuring it out. That was awesome.

Benjamin Finkel

This movie was recommended to me after I read a couple of "Pop-Sci"* books on linguistics and was regaling my friends and family with language facts (as one does). It is one of my favorite movies of all time. * The books in question are "Words on the Move" by John McWhorter and "Because, Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch.

danzthename

This is one of my absolute favorites. It's so beautiful, moving, and thought provoking. Louise is an amazing hero. Amy Adams is just the best. You guys figured out what was going on so quickly. I've never seen any reactors put it together that soon.

dys

Oh man, this is great to learn. I kinda assumed this was all shot in middle of nowhere, possibly Montana, USA.

ScarlettMi

She does have a whole linguistics team in her tent that she was introduced to as their new team leader. So it’s not just her working on it, but she’s the one talking with them.

Yannick, from Montréal

Oh do I agree with Abby T W when she says that Kevin, you're iconic in your speed to catch underlying themes in movies and shows, it's incredible. This was most probably the earliest you can catch the "twists"... And on your rewatch, knowing what it's about, just imagine every time Louise sees "a little girl" in her mind, what does she think it is? It's mind boggling...

Brandon

Echoes syncs perfectly with the Jupiter and Beyond section of 2001.

that girl

Story of Your Life is a great name for the short story, but I think it would make a terrible name for this movie.

streaky

Yeah, Sapir-Whorf has been pretty well comprehensively disproven since this movie was made - it does fall apart under even basic logical scrutiny to be fair. Great hypothesis to base a science fiction story off though. Seems to me it's easy to overthink the implications - somebody learns the language it would be contextualised to each person; it's best to think of it like we experience memories but forwards - we don't know other people's memories, and our memory plays tricks on us, there's no reason it wouldn't be the same forwards. It is a great movie though, we had a little run of excellent popular kinda hard science fiction for a time there, another one off the same pile being Ex Machina.

Clare Manion

Kevin - Excellent memory! Yes, there is a theory in linguistics that suggests the language one speaks affects how one thinks. It’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or as you said, linguistic relativity. And yes! the classic example is color categories. It can also effect how you think of time (do you think of the past in front of or behind you? Western cultures generally think of it behind you. Others (I forget who exactly) think of it as in front of you - because you can see it - and you walk backwards into the future - because you can’t see it.) Regardless, nobody is suggesting that learning a different language will allow you to see through time, but nonetheless this movie is a beautiful illustration of what such a thing could mean. At least for one person, on such an intimate level. It’s brilliant.

Jonathan Eaton

I'll have to try that. I haven't listen to Meddle in forever.

Skinny_Obelix

One of the interesting examples of language influencing our actions is that remote tribes in Congo didn't have a word for suicide, and therefore no suicide...

Ben Gilbert

The alien's view of time seems similar to that of Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Suzanne Whyte

I could practically see a lightbulb switch on above Kevin’s head when he figured it out lol.

Suzanne Whyte

Or did they not have a word for it because they didn’t need one?

Ashley Thomas

this movie is so incredible. its so interesting and smart and the concept is so cool. the alien design is so good. the way the movie is shot is so interesting and beautiful. the whole movie is so beautiful and sad and so full of emotion. its like you feel the whole movie as you go through it. i love how slow and intentional it is. ive seen it several times and it never gets old. so glad you watched this. i think if i were the main character i would choose to go through with the marriage and the child. you go through the pain, but if you choose not to you miss out on all the good. the only thing that doesnt make sense to me in this movie is that ian doesnt learn the language enough to think non linearly. like, shouldnt he have also known what was going to happen with their child? did he marry her and not bother to learn the language shes teaching that was taken from their shared alien experience? seems like he should have.

Youtalkingtome

I will rewatch this movie ASAP, because I guarantee I missed so much of the nuance of the story.

Youtalkingtome

Not subtitling that line is an interfering choice. While I usually love ambiguity in movies, this is a line I might have chosen to translate for the audience.

Abby T W

This sounds absolutely fascinating! I never took any classes like this and now I really wish I had!

JC

Sapir-Whorf has been disproven for human languages ;) Completely agree on it letting you remember the future and the implications. The way I think about it is that if you need to memorize something for a test you’d be able to do it before or after taking the test but you still have to do it and if you get it wrong on test day (because you misremembered) you don’t get to “go back” to do it again.

JC

Rewatches are great. The big things to look out for: The opening scene’s intentional use of language around memory and time. The foreshadowing of “language is the first weapon drawn in a conflict” from Louise’s book.

Amelie W

Ever think about free will? If you can see time from the outside, as Louise does, it can't exist - everything's already happened the only way it could happen. But we have to assume inside time, it's also possible to make choices, or else how can she summon the volition to do anything? No human being could. She even tells us she "elects" to have Hannah, for all the good and bad times that's going to give her. Both those things can't be true at the same time, not the way we understand reality to work with our three-dimensional brains. Literally, they can't - it's impossible to even imagine how it could work. But imagining it would be the first step to thinking in four dimensions. Which is just to say time makes no sense. I really like this movie, I don't know any other story that combines such profound, brain-bending fantastical ideas with such a sincere, believable, human drama. And the twist when you can figure out Louise is remembering the future manages what I think any story involving fantastic powers need that few of them do very well, to give the audience a sense of what the characters' altered reality feels like to them. Even without breaking the general washed-out, cloudy-day mood.

Rob Bob

I think of time as quantified eternity. I would think it’s impossible to measure something that has no beginning and no ending. But take a piece out of that, and while you can argue which of the sides is the beginning and which is the end, you would still be able to derive some agreed upon measurements from that piece. For anyone interested in exploring the kind of concepts brought up on this film, I suggest the two part series premiere of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. You wouldn’t have to watch beyond that, but the premier literally blew my mind open when I saw it. Would love to see the guys react to that premiere, if they’ve never seen it that is. Even if it isn’t a show they watch. That two hour premiere was an introduction sure, yet besides setting up the arc and characters, it can be viewed as a standalone story easily.

Youtalkingtome

America would be selling $250 commemorative coins With the spaceship on the back and Trump's angry mugshot engraved on the front.

Youtalkingtome

My goodness. What an incredibly high degree of difficulty, especially working away from Romance languages. My courses never were that intense (I was an English major taking 2 500-level linguistics classes, so yours were probably significantly more intense than mine), but the study of science language is so fascinating!

Youtalkingtome

What a GREAT series of reveals! Great screenplay, editing, and direction to pull it off so masterfully.

Youtalkingtome

The use of the canary was a wonderful homage to Spielberg, and reinforces early on that the aliens will be benevolent. I LOVE the way the movie slowly let out reveals (at least it seemed slow on first watch) to give you building chances to figure out what is actually going on with the story structure and the aliens' intentions. Just a great film.

Youtalkingtome

It's a fair question. I guess Ian as a physicist rather than a linguist didn't bother to learn the language to the same extent as Louise. After all, it takes her quite a while to get there herself. It makes me wonder how much of the language she teaches in her book. Her husband didn't read it?

Youtalkingtome

Ah, that makes sense. Same thing happened to Johnny Greenwood for There Will Be Blood.

Youtalkingtome

That "zero sum gain" twist (and the editing around it) was perfectly done.

Youtalkingtome

For sure, the idea of someone "rewiring their brain" by learning another language is a leap, but it definitely works for this movie.

Youtalkingtome

I absolutely love how it was used here. Was this a REAL leap with the theory? Absolutely. But hey, they're aliens. Their language can do whatever the screenwriter wants it to do!

Youtalkingtome

I know actors are on a truncated schedule, but man, I wish they would get the foreign pronunciations right even if it's just phonetically.

Alex

I really hope you still do Ghost. It's a great movie!

Darcy Smith

This is a perfect example of what makes science fiction great. The best scifi stories aren't really about aliens or spaceships, or what have you. Instead, the best scifi uses these elements as the mirror through which we can more clearly see the beauty and the tragedy of the human condition.

dys

I think that makes for great scifi though, taking a concept that doesn't entirely hold up in real science but seeing how far you can go with it. Gives it more of a feeling of plausibility than if the idea was made up out of whole cloth but you aren't restricted by what's actually possible.

Zach Hershman

Louise never had a choice. She wasn't seeing a possible future that she could change. She was seeing her entire life exactly as it plays out. That's the gift (or weapon) that the aliens gave her. She no longer experienced life in a linear matter. She knew from that moment her daughter would die and their marriage would end when she told him about it. Now that makes you wonder about free will, but it's possible that she no longer believes in free will.

Zach Hershman

I have taken 4 years of Spanish courses in my life. I can have pretty detailed conversations in Spanish, but there are still plenty of times where I feel lost. My take on the alien language is that you have to 100% comprehend it to become fully immersed and to rewire your brain to think like them. It's also possible that Louise is the only one who can because she was the only one to enter their natural environment.

Zach Hershman

She never said she elected to have the child. She said "despite knowing what will happen, she embraces it." That doesn't contradict her lacking free will. It actually emphasizes that her embracing all that the future holds was always going to be her reaction. A different person probably never would have seen a daughter because they would never see it the same.

that girl

Alternative title: Saving Dr Banks

that girl

I understand why they had to make it this way, but I would love to see a limited series that goes in-depth on the linguistics.

that girl

Also, as a linguist with red hair who saw this on my first date with my girlfriend, I've never been able to judge the film for what it is.

Anna

Something that clicked with me in this watch; much of the tension in the finale was about communicating fast enough to stave off destruction. Given the perspective and intentions of the aliens, I'm not convinced they would have attacked humanity if they had been attacked themselves, it's just pushing through the fear of potentially being in danger. This movie is so well done and I can't watch it enough.

dys

Seems like it's especially hard with Chinese. While my whole family was gathered at my parents' home recently (unfortunately because my dad was dying), we got my mom into Firefly for the first time, and one of the few missteps that otherwise basically perfect show makes is having a fair amount of Mandarin dialogue that isn't written or performed by native speakers. My sister-in-law who is Malaysian Chinese said she could mostly understand what they were *trying* to say but it was mostly overly-literal translations from English and the pronunciation was hard to understand.

Actuarial Lurker

One of my favorite YT channels is Words Unravelled https://www.youtube.com/@WordsUnravelled/videos where Rob and Jess explore language, etymology and other such topics I wanted to TRIPLE major in Math, Physics and English but my University wouldn't grant a triple degree even though I had the credits but DID permit a double BS in Math and Physics and Minor in Literature which is what I did.... I took numerous CS courses and the computer language LISP was interesting since it was based on some heavy underlying LIngustic theory (that I never studied- hence fpund it hard to write code in the language when I took the course 40 years ago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

Actuarial Lurker

ICE would separate them from their offspring....

Actuarial Lurker

Kevin- yes- pre Trump there WAS an international SCIENTIFIC protocol set up for a First Contact scenario to avoid mass panic and attempt to verify, and coordinate communication with the "visitors" through the UN. Each major first-world nation has its own protocol and they aren't well coordinated. There are clauses in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (which bans colonizing entire worlds in the name of a nation state, uses admirality law of the sea for disputes off world, treating space as if it were the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean with International Waters- banning piracy etc and has a section that handles encountering aliens off-Earth that has the nation-state that encounters them deal with it https://iaaspace.org/wp-content/uploads/iaa/Scientific%20Activity/setideclaration.pdf https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html

rese

That is fascinating

trenton gragg

The premise of this film, I my opinion, is what James Cameron was trying to accomplish with 1989’s The Abyss, especially if you watch the director’s cut, but with underwater aliens. Over the past 10-15 years, Amy Adams not receiving an Oscar nomination for this performance has been noted by critics and Oscar pundits as one of most egregious Oscar snubs. Stuhlbarg’s other appearance in a 2017 best picture nominated film was The Post.

Lola Lirola

Okay, here we go! *cracks knuckles* It's gonna be long, and it's gonna be scattered notes, like a collection of thoughts I had watching this with you guys: I'll put all the linguistics nerdery in a reply to this, for this who might enjoy it. This movie is definitely a deserved classic of the 21st Century for good reason. All the pieces: the music, the visuals, Amy Adams... all of them make the whole better. I gasped when Kevin figured it out!! Most people have the realization when Louise says "who is this child?", but the way Kevin jumped from the seat and said "We're doing non-linear here..." was so wonderfully cineamatic itself! 😅 I find the original story by Ted Chiang even more moving, because it deals more directly with the central question (if you knew it would end in tragedy, would it still be worth doing?) from the very start. The movie is more atmospheric and immersive, but the book is more emotional, imo. The beginning of the movie, where Louise goes to teach class and everything has changed reminds me so much of Alexander Chee's essay about going to teach class after Trump won his first election in 2016, and how he struggled to talk to his students about poetry in an apocalypse, what to teach that could somehow make sense in a world that did not make sense anymore, and how many times poetry became precisely the only thing that made sense in an apocalypse. There's an excerpt here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/19/on-becoming-an-american-writer/ but if you can find his book How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, the long full essay is orders of magnitude better. Here's a screenshot of the first page https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSIClQdaLzA-d0dlpD8GN2ZTY6fxsAyzFVYUIKs_z0tQA&s=10 On the difficulty of communicating with aliens, I am reminded of a comic vignette I have on my desk that depicts two ants on a tiled kitchen floor, saying "We've managed to send pheromones to the last confines of these tiles, and haven't received any response. Clearly we're alone in the universe." But also, I was born roughly around the time the Golden Record on the Voyager was sent out, so my parents always joke about how far I've gotten when we get news about where it is nowadays. I absolutely love that this movie mostly deals with how difficult translating something actually is!! Umberto Eco has a whole book about it called "Mouse or Rat?", and pretty much like the dilemma between "tool or weapon", you can sometimes spend hours breaking your brain to try to decide what to use. It is rare to see my profession in a movie, especially portrayed kinda accurately! A lot of staring at screens, a lot of thinking, a lot of trying to convince people to give you more time and nuance. I am also reminded of how interpreters had a full on crisis when Trump came along because trying to convey his rambling and insulting incoherences to other world leaders was a total minefield. I do dream in English sometimes, fully on, I think I started dreaming in English around the time I started reading books in English in my everyday life, so around 17. But the one thing I cannot do in English is maths! Like, at all. Which is ironic, what with maths being considered a "universal language"... But even for things like 7*3 I have to do "siete por tres son veintiuno, which is twenty one... 21!". Funny how I can never manage it in English.

Lola Lirola

Some linguistics nerdery!! 🎉 The "kangaroo = I don't understand" is a linguistics urban legend, but!! There are examples that really happened! The Pima tribe in what is today's Arizona and Sonora got that name because when the Spanish colonizers asked them questions, they repeatedly answered "pi'ma", which means "I don't know". They actually called themselves O'ob (or O'odham) in general, which simply means "river people". So many other native populations just say "we're people" when colonizers come along, and that ends up becoming their name: Inuit, Dinè or Wintu mean "people", Māori means "normal"... Meanwhile, a lot of American tribes got the wrong names applied to them because colonizers dragged along enslaved interpreters from other tribes, and they used pejorative terms: Sioux means "little snake", but they call themselves Dakota/Lakota (meaning "allies"). Comanche comes from a Ute word meaning "someone who's against me all the time" or "enemy forever". They actually call themselves "Numunu" (meaning people). Winnebago is derogatory & means "people of the filthy water". They refer to themselves as Ho-Chunk. Adirondack means “bark-eater”, an insult implying you suck at hunting. Apache comes from Zuni for the word “Enemy”, they call themselves Ndee (people). There's other examples that show how difficult it is to communicate across cultures! Torpenhow Hill is a fabulous example of people pointing at the same mound in different languages: The first Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the place called it Torr, which just means "hill". Then the Celts came along, and they called hills "Penn", so when they asked "what's that hill (Penn) called?" and the people replied "it's just called hill (Torr)", the Celts said "Wonderful! Torr Penn it is!". Centuries later, new people came in, and they called hills "How", so they called it, obviously, Torpen How. And finally today, we call it "Torpenhow Hill". I love it. That poor hill that everyone calls hill over and over. I wonder what it will be called in a thousand years.

Lola Lirola

So let's tackle the big Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the room. The idea is that we can only clearly perceive what we can explicitly name, and that therefore language you speak shapes how you see the world. It's been debunked, as many have commented, but there are still some interesting examples. There's a Himba tribe in Africa that has a specific name for a color between blue and green (this is what Kevin mentioned in the reaction!), and in color wheels with similar hues they are able to identify the "different" one much faster than speakers of languages that don't have a name for that color. More related to the subject of time, the indigenous South American language Aymara structures time with the past in front of us (because we can see it), and the future behind (because we can't see it yet), so they see time passing as things appearing in front of them, instead of leaving them behind... It's obviously not as simple as "if you speak this language, you think this way", and of course people can perceive things that we don't have a name for yet, that's why we invent names for the things we perceive! Or borrow names (like, English does have a word for Schadenfreude, it's called "Schadenfreude"! In Spanish we adopted "zapping" or "sandwich"). Or transform them. And many experiences are not even verbalized, and that doesn't mean they didn't happen. To me, it just indicates what things a culture considers important enough to name separately. That's the significance. That it happens often enough or it's important enough that people coined a name for it. Not that others can't comprehend it or it doesn't exist elsewhere! For example, the legend that Inuit has 100 words for snow is not true, although they do have many, the language is just agglutinative (like German), and so snow-nobody-walked-on-yet becomes a single word, but you can actually say that exact same thing in English (I just did!) and everyone understands. So no, it doesn't rewire your brain. But, as a bilingual person, having multiple languages does make you notice and have shorthand for more things than just one language would, so it's always good!

Lola Lirola

Oh, wow, dys, so you really are the art/science combo of the movie!

Lola Lirola

Abby, omg, yes!! I didn't know I would be calling all linguists to assemble here, but I am loving all of it!!

Lola Lirola

Ultimately, though, all the nerdery is just icing, because the story is a very human plea against eugenics (disabled and short lives are still worth living and celebrating), about the literal marriage of humanities and science and how doing science while forgetting about being human leads to disaster. About life being worth enthusiastically embracing even if we know it inevitably ends. About having children in difficult circumstances. Even about being able to retain some optimism for the future even if it looks too different from what we expected.

Lola Lirola

Also, yeah, the opening is at Pixar's Up level of direct gut punch, isn't it?

Lola Lirola

Oh, so cool! I didn't know it was Canada. It looks **gorgeous**.

Youtalkingtome

“Torpenhow Hill” is awesome! To be completely honest, I think I sounded much smarter than I am; I definitely caught that Hannah’s life came after the alien arrival, but has not yet put together that Louise was seeing time non-linearly. Such a great movie!

Youtalkingtome

Thanks for sharing that. That’s pretty fascinating!

Youtalkingtome

This would make a good limited run series for sure.

Actuarial Lurker

If you've seen the movie Contact with Jodie Foster that is why she goes on her own and asks Australians to verify her detection signal. Later the James Woods character wants to know "who gave you authority to do that?" and she as Dr Arroway snaps back- "it's not like a signal from space is a secret...every radio telescope can detect it..I followed protocol" and then Drumlin backs her up...back in the 1990s this was normal- not sure if Trump's "Space Force" makes the aliens buy crypto from Jared and Don Jr.

Michael Bennett

There is a very small number of films where I feel as though the director is communicating with me directly, almost telepathically. This is one of those films. Denis Villeneuve is using the camera, the framing, and the editing as a visual storytelling language. All directors do this, but it felt to me like Villeneuve was *teaching* me his visual language in the same way that the heptapods were teaching humanity theirs. By the third act, the audience has a similar experience to Louise, and we can get "ahead" of the film and understand what's going to happen.

Michael Bennett

Joe, you were asking for a re-release in theaters, I hope you get the opportunity, it's a great watch on a big screen with a proper sound system. We've got a great local theater that does theme months, like Chris Nolan month or 90s action month, etc. I bet they include Arrival in one of their Sci-FI themes, or maybe they do a Villeneuve month.

Youtalkingtome

I always check the regal app just to see what's getting a re release. A Sc-Fi mini film festival would be awesome

Actuarial Lurker

Pink Floyd, The Eagles and Depeche Mode are my 3 favorite groups.... Echoes is a prog masterpiece....most people don't realize that Andrew Lloyd Weber basically stole the whole theme song of "Phantom of the Opera" from that track and teh band just shrugged it off...they could have made millions suing over the rights.... They're BOTH in 12/8 time, same chords, everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlhUob7ZERI Animals is still my favorite Floyd album....and Dogs is the best track....

Lola Lirola

Just letting people know that I did indeed rant at length, but since comments are not ranked by new anymore it's somewhere hidden on there. Just because someone did ask, I guess assuming I would rant here, but I made a new comment instead and they didn't see it! 😅

dys

I'm going to read all your "rant", much as I love how much Joe and Kevin engage with the comments I know they have to pick and choose what to respond to in page-length comments here. Even if it wasn't for the patreon ranking change they wouldn't have had time to reply in detail, I've left some multiple-paragraph comments on movies I purchased well before that where I think they did read all the comments, but it wouldn't be reasonable to expect them to reply to every point. But I'm going to take a stab at reading and replying to all your comments because I love engaging with this community and especially with people who have special knowledge on the movies they watch. Again I took a few undergrad linguistics courses but so much of what I studied for a computer science degree in college involved linguistics. Formal language theory is equally foundational in linguistics and computer science.

Lola Lirola

Ooh, this is such an amazing read, I love it!

Alka

Truly one of the most wonderful films of the past decade. It really stays with you for a long time, and just like Louise, if you take time to immerse yourself with this film, you will be surprised as to how it could change your perspective on things. The entire concept of Louise's character experiencing the past, present and future all at once is indeed terrifying and dreary but also ironically freeing. In a way, I see her as the most free person in that world. To be able to experience life that way can make you feel truly living. The pressure of chasing what you want to be might be lessened, love and loss will not be confined to a beginning and end, and even the empathy for one's self and for the people around you will be much deeper. It can also be maddening and paralyzing, maybe that's the more likely case even. We are not built to see and feel everything at once. But I like that they went with Louise choosing to go through with it because experiencing love, joy and loss are what makes living worthwhile, and choosing to deny herself that would not be her truly living. I agree that this film has the right balance of the sci-fi stuff and emotional beats. This story about an alien arriving on Earth and teaching us their language is much more human the most 'realistic' stories out there. Enjoyed your reactions! Excited for the next ones in your line-up :)

Jérémy

Hello Joe and Kevin! I know this was posted a month ago but I still wanted to comment. It's been a minute (I was last subscribed to the channel last December). Since then there's been so much change, mostly positive change in my life which made it so I didn't have a lot of time for reaction channel watching anymore, as much as I enjoyed my weekly dose of Buffy and Gilmore Girls commentary. But today I got an intrusive thought of "I wonder how they're doing" and checked the channel only to find that you reacted to my favorite movie of all time!! I had to subscribe again if only to watch you guys react to my favorite Villeneuve film (and there are so many good ones). I hope you are both doing well. Okay I'm making myself a hot chocolate and diving in your reaction!