Current Events > Just watched Arrival (spoilers). Can anyone discuss it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I love that movie. It's up there with Interstellar. I don't know much about linguistics though so I can't speak much on that.

I liked it, but the ending made no sense to me. Learning their language gives you time travel powers?

The way I understood it is that once you truly understand the language, you gain access to time on another dimension that doesn't just move forward. Like, your memories are no longer just from the past, but also from the future, so you can sort of time travel by remembering things that haven't happened yet.

I liked it, but the ending made no sense to me. Learning their language gives you time travel powers?

The way I interpreted it, it's not really time travel at all, Louis, by mastering their language, was able to perceive time just like the heptapods do (non-linearly). It seems the timeline is already set in stone and instead of experiencing it one event after the other, they experience it as it being just there all laid out.

I don't know if I'm going out of my depth here, maybe I am, but I like to think it's like if you were to master a language that makes heavy use of absolute cardinal directions (like Kuuk Thaayorre or another similar Australian Aboriginal language) instead of relative directions, you kind of end up living your life as if you had a compass with you at all times.

At least that's how I imagine it. I think language does shape the way we think to at least some degree.

My interpretation is that the technology humans gave the aliens technology to help save their civilization was actually a war weapon, I think there is a third alien group that also attacked humans where humans became victorious in the end, when the Arrival aliens saw that as extinctual threat they asked humans for same weapons in case the other aliens resurge and attempt to attack them. In exchange for the war weapon Arrival aliens give them their language which help them predict the future with great accuracy, not actual time travel but great predictably and statistical understanding - hence all the events in Arrival unfold and Louise who masters the language is able to accept everything that will happen in her life, after her husband also gets to this point he knows too and blames her for never warning him

I've seen the movie twice, and I can swear that the first time had a scene that was missing the second time.
Louise is in the future, being a teacher that teach the alien linguistics to students. One asks if they can get rich by checking next week's lottery numbers, and she answers that they can't chose what to see from the future.