This post contains major plot spoilers about Arrival.

In one of the final scenes of Arrival, the new first-contact science fiction film with a focus on linguistics, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) explains why she got divorced. “He said I made the wrong choice,” the linguist tells her daughter Hannah. It’s an easy line to overlook, especially as the gravity of the film’s second-half surprise sinks in. Throughout the film, Louise is experiencing not her memories of the past, but living out precognitive moments of her own future. She is experiencing time out of order, because her efforts to understand an alien language have irreversibly rewired her brain.

The credit for this narrative trick goes to author Ted Chiang, who plotted Arrival back in 2002 as a first-person short story called Story of Your Life. His work cleverly uses different tenses, mixing future, past, and present to weave the complex non-linear knot of Louise’s life in a way reminiscent of Billy Pilgrim from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Chiang’s hidden meanings, and the things that inevitably got lost in translating his words to the big screen, are pivotal to help viewers understand what Arrival is saying.

Reading Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ gives you a deeper understanding of the message of ‘Arrival’

Arrival is a versatile science fiction film that communicates on many levels. It’s about language and cooperation, about people transcending barriers and immersing themselves in a new culture to understand a foreign race. The aliens, arriving in 12 monolithic space ships and known as heptapods because of their seven-legged giant squid appearance, are terrifying. But they are peaceful and want to help humanity, because their own non-linear perception of time tells them they’ll need our help thousands of years from now. Louise’s journey into how the heptapods’ minds work — how the aliens communicate, and what that says about how they perceive reality — is a common genre trope, but director Denis Villeneuve uses it to subvert the usual routine of the Hollywood blockbuster.

Yet the film is more concerned with a deeper, grander theme about free will and personal responsibility. Story of Your Life spotlights those ideas more than any others. The theme rests on a line Louise utters in one of Arrival’s closing scenes. “If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things?” she asks her future husband Ian Donnelly. Put another way, would you rob someone of their existence, and yourself of the time shared with them on Earth, if you knew they would one day would feel pain, and you would feel their loss?

The question haunts the narrative because Louise is harboring a terrible secret. She knows Hannah will die young. She knows this before she even decides to conceive Hannah with Ian, a theoretical physicist who, years earlier, helped Louise crack the alien language, even though he does not speak it himself. When Louise tells Ian their daughter will die, he’s naturally upset. He assumes Louise could have warned him, or refused to have a child — changed the future. But Louise made the choice, even knowing the eventual outcome.

In Story of Your Life, the eventual rift between Louise and Ian is left unexplored, but the plot is largely the same. Louise’s understanding of the heptapods’ written language reorients her sense of cause and effect. It turns her perception of time into a two-way river that Chiang illustrates through brief intermissions that visit Hannah’s childhood and adolescence in future tense, as if Louise is forecasting the beats of her daughter’s life. Using the real-world theory of linguistic relativity — which states, controversially, that what language we speak affects how our brain works — Chiang transforms Louise’s life into a series of out-of-order moments that can be experienced singularly, including her daughter’s eventual death.

Unlike ‘Arrival,’ ‘Story of Your Life’ focuses solely on Louise’s new understanding of time

But Story of Your Life diverges from Arrival in one key aspect. While Louise immerses herself in the heptapods’ language, the rest of the world’s experts, including Ian, share knowledge about the aliens’ understanding of physics, math, and other disciplines. In the film, Ian doesn’t have much narrative purpose. In the story, his explorations of how the aliens perceive light refraction winds up informing Louise’s new understanding of time.

In the story, there is no military tension, no setting up of China or Russia as aggressors, and no misguided American soldiers sabotaging the spaceship that landed in America. Story of Your Life is entirely focused on Louise’s rewired perception of her own life, and her pivotal choice to have a daughter despite the pain she knows it will cause. The reveal — that Louise has seen her daughter’s future — is not a surprise sci-fi twist, but a slow and steady realization. Even Chiang’s title has an obvious double meaning almost from the get-go, the pronoun “your” belonging both to Louise’s daughter and the idea that we as humans are made of our memories and defined by our choices.

This message exists in Arrival, but it’s hidden under broader plot movements, big drama, and more visible Hollywood layers. Chiang limits the scope of Story of Your Life to a reflection on personal choice. He says foreseeing a choice and then making it is not the cruelty of fate in action, but a powerful exercise in free will.

Viewers are already theorizing about the film’s plot, and whether it means that humans who learn the heptapod language can alter their own futures. Whether Louise can change anything is besides the point. In Arrival’s deterministic universe, free will exists in the form of following through on a choice you already know you’ll make. In effect, by choosing not to alter the future, you’re creating it, and actively affirming it.

“The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don’t act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons,” Louise says in Chiang’s story. “What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s events; it is also that their motives coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.”

“They act to create the future, to enact chronology.”

Underneath the technical complexity of the explanation is a profound truth Chiang is communicating — and one Arrival similarly hammers home. “What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person?” Louise ponders. “What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?” And it is precisely because Louise understands what it will be like to lose her daughter that she chooses to bring her into the world nonetheless.

Readers aren’t necessarily supposed to agree with Louise’s choice. (Some of our own writers don’t.) But Arrival isn’t about time travel. It’s also not a commentary on gene-modification, abortion, or any other hot-button topic about using our foresight into the future to force our present path to diverge. It’s about acceptance, understanding our life’s choices, and living as if any one moment were as valuable or meaningful as the next.

The film suggests that knowing what will happen in the future doesn’t diminish the meaning behind a choice you’ll make today. On the contrary, it says every choice you do make can be made knowing it will actively shape what’s to come. As Emerson once wrote, life's a journey, not a destination. In the circular, non-linear minds of Arrival’s aliens and Louise Banks, the destination doesn’t even exist.

Instead of treating that message like a superpower to acquire, the film delivers it as a subtle worldview. Hidden under Arrival’s more palatable themes about overcoming cultural differences and uniting as one species is Chiang’s more direct message about learning how to appreciate life’s moments, to live outside the bounds of time.

If we could see our lives laid out before us, would we change anything? Story of Your Life — and by extension Arrival — is telling us to live as if the answer is, and always will be, a resolute no.