Denis Villeneuve's Arrival has a huge twist that reframes the entire timeline of the story from a completely different perspective that changes all.

Summary

• The timeline in Arrival is non-linear, with the twist being that the apparent flashbacks are actually memories of future events.
• The non-linear progression of the story allows the audience to experience the same confusion and discovery as the protagonist.
• While the protagonist can experience time non-linearly, other characters follow a linear timeline, with the story beginning with the aliens' arrival and ending with Hannah's death.

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrivalmight seem like a basic sci-fi movie on the surface, but it actually has a very complicated timeline that’s easy to misunderstand. The film tells the story of a professional linguist named Louise Banks who’s called in by the government when aliens land on the planet. It’s her job to ensure humans can interact effectively with these creatures, but she soon learns that their form of communication is beyond anything that human beings are capable of.

Villeneuve easily ranks among today’s best sci-fi directors, with Arrival being one of the first projects that allowed him to ascend to this title. It’s an incredibly complicated story that he manages to make simple through plenty of clear visual clues, allowing the audience to track Banks’ journey from start to finish - even when it’s not presented that way in the story. The big twist at the end of Arrival reveals that everything preceding that moment hasn’t been exactly as it seems, but upon a rewatch, all the clues are presented from the beginning, allowing the audience to piece Banks’ timeline together in the right order.

Banks' "Memories" Of Hannah Are Actually From The Future

At the end of Arrival, it’s revealed that Banks has acquired the ability to view time in the same way that the aliens do: non-linearly. This means that she’s lost all concepts of past, present, and future, with each of these points bleeding together in her perception and happening all at once. It’s this distorted timeline that the audience is presented with right from the beginning, with the apparent ‘flashbacks’ of Banks’ daughter revealed as memories that haven’t even happened yet.

Arrival’s twist messes with the audience’s mind at first, but it actually makes complete sense once you begin to view the narrative as non-linear. Banks’ daughter hasn’t even been born when she’s experiencing these memories, but Banks knows that she’s destined to only live for twelve years. It completely distorts her perception of time and prevents her from experiencing her own life in the order that it should happen. However, this ability is shown to be both a blessing and a curse as she uses her foreknowledge of the future to bend the present around her will.

Arrival's Events All Happen Once, But Nonlinearly

What’s important to note about Arrival’s timeline is that it’s not non-linear in the same way that movies like Pulp Fiction or Memento are non-linear: it’s not jumping around between past, present, and future. These moments are all happening at the exact same time, but Banks (and the aliens) are the only ones who aren’t forced to view them in a sequential order. When the audience is presented with those "memories" of Hannah’s death, this isn’t something that Banks has experienced in the past or will experience in the future, it’s something that she’s experiencing right now - but it takes the aliens for her to gain access to this.

The clues to Arrival’s twist are available from the beginning, as the story opens on something that hasn’t technically happened yet from Banks’ perspective. By confusing the audience and placing them within this non-linear timeframe, Villeneuve is allowing his viewers to go through the same process as his protagonist and gradually learn to view time differently. These moments in Banks’ timeline are all presented out of order, and while they initially appear to be flashbacks, it makes the twist ending much more comprehensible as the audience is already familiar with this non-linear progression.

Arrival's Linear Timeline Begins With The Aliens' Arrival & Ends With Hannah's Death

Although Banks has the ability to experience time non-linearly, that isn’t true for every other character in the story. They have to live their lives sequentially, which means there does exist a linear timeline that everybody else must follow. In terms of the events covered in Arrival, this timeline begins with the aliens arriving on Earth, continues into Banks’ attempts to make conversation with them, and ultimately results in Hannah’s death approximately thirteen years later.

It’s this ability to view the story in several different ways that makes Arrival one of Villeneuve’s best movies yet. The audience is initially thrust into Banks’ distorted perspective, but thanks to the clues that Villeneuve includes in every single scene, there’s enough information to piece together the ‘actual’ timeline and make sense of this story from a more accessible perspective. Hannah’s death is both the beginning and the ending of the film, depending on which frame point you’re accessing the story from, which makes the entire story an endless cycle.