Arrival - The Meaning of Language

Rating: 8/10 (12 November 2016)

The movie starts with a silent scene, filming the inside of a house next to a stormy sea - I find hear 'sea' a key word, because of it's meaning: something moving back and forth without stopping, something endless. On the right side, there's a table with a bottle of wine and two half full glasses. This scene is important, as it will become a part of a loop which connects to the idea of 'endless', as suggested by the sea.
It is Dr Louise, with a Phd in Linguistics, that is approached by the intelligence to translate a language that the visitors are speaking.

What visitors? - Just 10 minutes ago, a black alien space ship standing horizontally, has landed and the military recorded these sounds. Can you translate this?

The context is much more complex than this short dialogue is showing. Dr Louise and the scientist called Ian are sent on the ship, where gravity makes them walk on walls. Before the encounter, Dr Louise is having visions of a child she doesn't know, she's having memories of things that didn't happened. Being overworked by the military and going through a tormenting series of memories, her emotional state is stretched even further by the overwhelming contact with the Heptapods, the aliens that look like an octopus. It seemed to me like a cliché, watching in the cinema, octopus shaped aliens making powerful sounds and coming to a meeting with a linguist. Also, the aliens were using their tentacles to spray ink that would form a shape containing information - their language, a non linear language that would express a system of concepts in a shape, a picture of their thoughts in a split second so you don't have to use words and waste time. Based on this, it's the crucial idea of the movie: time and how a language changes the way the mind perceives the world, which tells you that the aliens were seeing time as circular. So, like the sea ... endless. And coming back to Dr. Louise's memories, by the time she decodes the alien shapes, her mind begins processing the memories further in time (because of the way the language affects your thinking), seeing the future and using information as the world is coming to global war, having a bad understanding of why the aliens are on Earth. Chine declares war and all the other nations follow, but at a critical moment the time line of her memories matches the time line of her present day and she remembers future events. Using the information from the future, she stops the offensive, but there's something else: that room again, with the view at the stormy sea and the table with a bottle of wine and ... one glass of wine now. Because, there she is, with her husband (the scientist) and daughter (the child in her memories), just pouring some wine in her glass, watching her family. Her future family, because right now she sees Ian, just outside the military base around the alien ship, having no idea that he'll be having a daughter with her, and the ... endless stormy sea. The painful gift