The movie Arrival, we watched this Friday is a very interesting science fiction movie about aliens, UFO, but instead of depicting the appearance and personalities of the aliens, it emphasis on their language. The story led by the main character a linguist Louise Banks, who managed to communicate with the aliens learn about their languages and figure out their intentions to earth.

This movie reminds me of the Cognitive Science class that I’m taking right now about how humans learn new languages and the universal language grammar. In this movie, the weapon that the aliens bring to the earth is their language, which could foresee the future and the past. This is a huge power, but yet the ending of the movie Louise realized her sad future if she fall in love with Ian, and have a child with him despite the fact that she know the child’s fate. This is really devastating because she has to follow her fate, and she can’t change it. The timeline explanation has always been a tough problem for this time travel story, because if we change the present how will the future change is always unknown and it’s easy to reach a contradiction for either way of explanation. Luckily, this movie mostly focused on the communication and how the main character unravel the mystery of the language instead of showing how the further story develops after humans have the power of knowing the future. This decision made the audience enjoyed the movie , instaed of picking the logic contradiction within the assumption of the movie.

Therefore, overall this is a very enjoyable movie, and I’m glad that it reminds me of some fun knowledge I learnt from my course.