Heptapod story of your life
This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. “Your father is about to ask me the question. The story is told from Louise’s perspective, as something that she is recounting to her daughter - the unnamed “you.”Ĭhiang is also deceptively clever with his use of tense.
#HEPTAPOD STORY OF YOUR LIFE MOVIE#
Notably, the movie includes scenes that show how the world reacted when the heptapods landed, the utter weirdness of Louise’s first experience in the alien spacecraft, and her first meaningful contact with Abbott and Costello.Īs evident from the title, “Story of Your Life” the short story uses a combination of first- and second-person point of view. So instead there’s a scene where Louise dissects a question for Colonel Weber on a whiteboard.Īnd while the short story is relatively meditative in nature, the inherent drama of an “alien landing” story must be emphasized more for the big screen. In the short story, Louise can simply explain these concepts to the reader through her internal monologue. Most of the academic explanations and “science stuff” become fully-fledged scenes in the movie - a great example of which is the “nature of a question scene.” However, the short story is information-dense - Chiang uses plenty of pages to explain the linguistic principles, scientific theories, and step-by-step process needed to establish communication with the heptapods, not to mention the attention-to-detail spent on explaining the heptapods’ relationship with mathematics.įor an epic visual story, all of that complex, heady information must be translated into concrete, externalized scenes. Many of the scenes from “Story of Your Life” appear in the final film adaptation, including Louise’s initial meeting with Colonel Weber, the use of the word “human” to first communicate with the heptapods, and the non-zero-sum game sequence. Louise is first approached by Colonel Weber, then she travels to the alien landing site, and spends a period of time working to decipher a way to communicate with the heptapods. In terms of the heptapod plotline, the movie keeps the timeline from Chiang’s short story almost completely intact. In both, Louise’s daughter’s tragic death is disclosed from the very beginning - revealed in the second paragraph of the short story the first few minutes of the movie.Īnd in both, Louise’s prior knowledge of her daughter’s death is hinted at but not fully realized until the end of the story. The movie, like the short story, begins and ends on the night Louise’s daughter is conceived. The structure of “Story of Your Life” is so inventive, so well-suited to the story, that Arrival really doesn’t need to deviate from it in any substantial way.
In this way, Louise’s memories from her daughter’s life serve as the thematic throughline of the story, while the alien language storyline acts as the main plot. The short story starts on the night Louise’s daughter is conceived, with Louise presumably telling her daughter “the story of your life.” The chronology is unclear at first, with the narrative jumping around to various moments in the daughter’s life while continuously returning to Louise’s attempt to decipher and learn the heptapod language. The movie adds several supporting characters who do not appear in the short story - General Shang, Agent Halpern, and Captain Marks - and gives a name to Louise’s daughter, who appears but is unnamed in the short story.Īdditionally, while much about the two main alien heptapods is the same, their nomenclature is varied - Flapper and Raspberry in the short story, Abbott and Costello in the movie. The former’s name remains the same in Villeneuve’s film (played by Forest Whitaker), while the latter’s is changed to Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner). In the short story, she is joined by Colonel Weber and a physicist named Gary. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams in the movie), a brilliant linguist who is tasked with finding a way to communicate with the alien life forms that have arrived on Earth. The basic premise of the story remained unchanged in the adaptation from short story to feature film - while telling the story of her daughter’s life, a linguist recounts her experience deciphering and learning an alien language. More info coming soon | Remind Me What's It About?