And sure, maybe you already knew it was coming - but if you think that makes it a "bad" twist, you're missing the larger point. Louise and Ian will have a baby after the events with the aliens, and Louise will choose to live through her time with her daughter even though she knows that her daughter will die of an incurable disease. As the film comes to a close, it becomes clear that the flashbacks we saw earlier were in fact images of the future. In addition to brewing geopolitical conflict, there's more personal drama at play. As Adams begins to understand the coded messages the aliens share - a language that allows one to see, in Chiang's words, an "entire epoch as a simultaneity" - she effectively travels through time to save the world from military disaster by hearing a whispered message from a Chinese general in the future, and relaying it back to him in the present. What makes the film truly unique - and ultimately more compelling than similarly gooey space adventures like Contact and Interstellar - is the way the film's occasionally jumbled final third plays out. This Close Encounters business is given a doom-soaked, unnerving sheen by Sicario director Denis Villeneuve, who could find white-knuckle tension and palm-sweating anxiety in a trip to Denny's if he wanted to. At the site, she meets astrophysicist Ian Donnelly (a very subdued, dad-like Jeremy Renner), who helps her make contact and eventually study the complex language of creatures they come to refer to as "heptapods." At various points, we're also shown what most viewers assume are flashbacks to a period when Louise had a child who is no longer with her. It begins with a college linguistics professor named Louise Banks (Adams) being whisked away by a scowling military commander (Forest Whitaker) to potentially communicate with aliens who have arrived on Earth in large black ships that look like levitating wireless speakers. On the surface, Arrival appears to be yet another "mystery box" film. What makes Arrival unique is how the actual thematic concept driving the finale - a mind-bending notion about how the past, present, and future of one's life could be both known and experienced all at once - actually pushes against the "every story is a puzzle to solve" culture we now live in. It's not uncommon for great plot twists (or even bad ones) to make you rethink all the events in a movie - most of the best ones, like the shattering coffee cup in The Usual Suspects or the big reveal in Planet of the Apes, do exactly that. Luckily, Arrival, the new science-fiction film starring Amy Adams and adapted from a short story by writer Ted Chiang, is the rare movie with a big twist that's also know-it-all-proof: Even "knowing" the twist can't ruin the payoff. You probably have that friend who insists they knew Edward Norton was Tyler Durden all along, or the person who guessed Bruce Willis was a ghost the second he showed up in The Sixth Sense. Know-it-all viewers of science-fiction films, thrillers, and other genre fare often take pleasure in calling the endings of movies before they're even over. Warning: This post contains spoilers for the movie Arrival, and discusses the ending of the movie in detail.
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