Arrival: Book vs. Movie
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) adapts Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella Story of Your Life. A linguist recruited to communicate with alien visitors finds that understanding their language demands a new way of thinking.
From Books Adapted
What changed from the book
The movie adds an international crisis to the short story
Arrival takes Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life” through its conclusion, while expanding what happens outside Louise’s research.
Chiang’s story follows Louise’s work through remote communication with the visitors. The movie sends her into a spacecraft. It also adds military pressure and the threat of a confrontation between the countries responding to the arrival.
Eric Heisserer said he proposed the more immediate encounter to Chiang when seeking the rights. He built the added drama around how people and governments might react in real time.
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Louise’s daughter dies younger, and from a different cause
In Chiang’s story, Louise’s daughter grows up and dies in a climbing accident. The movie makes Hannah younger and gives her an incurable illness instead.
Heisserer said an accident would invite the question of why Louise did not warn her daughter once she knew the future. The illness retained a loss she could foresee without giving her an obvious way to prevent it. He also said keeping Hannah younger helped avoid revealing the timeline through conspicuous aging of Louise.
How it was adapted
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The movie makes Louise’s experience of time a gradual discovery
The short story moves between Louise’s daughter and the alien-language work from the beginning. The movie opens with images of Hannah, then holds back the explanation that these are glimpses of the future.
Heisserer said he delayed most of those shifts until Louise had spent time learning the language. Their frequency increases as she learns, and the movie gives her moments of confusion about which part of her life she is experiencing.
About the book and the movie
- Author
- Ted Chiang
- Year
- 1998
- Pages
- 304Buy book
- Audiobook length
- 10 hr 23 minGet audiobook
- Narrator
- Abby Craden, see all
Linguist Louise Banks addresses her daughter while recalling the work that brings her into contact with an alien species. Studying the visitors’ speech and writing alongside a physicist, she discovers that learning their language requires more than finding equivalents for human words. Scenes from her daughter’s life interrupt the account, drawing Louise’s most intimate experiences into her effort to understand an unfamiliar way of thinking.
- Director
- Denis Villeneuve
- Writer
- Ted Chiang, Eric Heisserer
- Year
- 2016
- Runtime
- 1 hr 56 minWatch on Amazon
- Cast
- Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg
- Genre
- Drama, Mystery, science fiction, Thriller
- IMDb
- View on IMDb
After twelve spacecraft appear around the world, the US military brings Louise Banks to Montana to establish communication with their occupants. Working with physicist Ian Donnelly, she builds a vocabulary while officials demand an immediate explanation for the visitors’ arrival. As international cooperation breaks down, Louise must defend a patient approach to understanding beings whose words could be mistaken for a threat.
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