Movie Endings Explained – Arrival (video)

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Movie endings, they're usually pretty straight forward right? Everything pays off, the main characters learn something, and our heroes ride off into the sunset. Sometimes though, we don't get the typical ending from a movie, we get something much more nuanced, complex and open ended. The kind of endings that leave things up in the air for all of us to debate and theorize on until we're blue in the face. With Movie Endings Explained, we aim to delve into some of the more ambiguous and mysterious endings to films that have left audiences scratching their heads for years, and to attempt to explain them. In most cases, a definitive answer isn't really there, so we definitely want to hear from YOU on how you interpret the various endings we'll be discussing with this series.

This time we're looking at the recent sci-fi film ARRIVAL from director Denis Villeneuve, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. Based on the 1998 short story The Story of Your Life, the 2016 movie follows linguist specialist Louise Banks as she attempts to communicate with an alien species that have landed on Earth. Language and our perception of time are the two key elements that make the story tick, and a third act reveal uses both of those ingredients to flip the film on its head. So we're going to look at some of the clues that may have been dropped earlier in the film to signal this twist, but also the nature of the twist itself, and whether it's as simple as it may appear on the surface…