Non-Linear Time

Rating: 10/10 (14 November 2016)

This is a brilliant film that is deservedly sparking a lot of interesting discussion about its themes.
A lot of reviews, however, are ignoring what seems to me to be the defining facet of the film: a narrative that deliberately confuses past, present, and future, and that can be constructed as linear in multiple ways. Looking back, the opening monologue gives this away, with Adams musing about the limiting structures of time and about being unsure of beginnings and endings. As the film goes on, certain scenes seem clearly to be either flashbacks or premonitions, but this clarity gets disrupted toward the end, as we are left to wonder if Adams' daughter's life precedes or follows the alien arrival. On my viewing, it seems that this ambiguity is precisely the point.
A lot of reviews are trying to organize this film as a linear narrative with instances of either recalling the past or seeing the future, but this language itself remains trapped in a notion of linear time (seeing forward or backward) that the film is trying to disrupt. The film hints at this paradox in a number of interesting moments: the daughter's name as palindrome, the "future" conversation with General Shang in which Adams nonetheless does not recall her past conversation with him, the ways the alien language is subtitled ('Abbot process death', if I recall correctly). One might even say the film is actually about the limits of language (or at least, human language): its structure is rooted in a sense of linear time that is itself a product of language (hence the reference to Sapir-Whorf). The film never quite gets at 'how' the alien language moves its users beyond linear time, but this seems to only reinforce the film's ideas about the limits of its own mediums, language and narrative (the latter of which necessarily moves from beginning to end). This film also presents an interesting contrast to Interstellar, which felt far more confident about language's capacity to grasp a radically other form of existence (for example, the aliens existing in certain 'dimensions').
As an aside, there is an interesting irony (intentional or otherwise) in making the Chinese the bad guys. Verbs in the Chinese language do not inflect, meaning they do not change to indicate past, present, or future tense. It seems that in reality the bad guys might have been best-positioned to figure the whole thing out!
Anyway, go see this film, embrace the confusion, and then see it again.