“Arrival” unfolds a beautiful science fiction story about time, memory, loss, and yes, big alien ships. And it’s the film’s gorgeous ending that ties all those threads together into something truly stirring and moving, with screenwriter Eric Heisserer rightfully earning an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Ted Chiang‘s “Story Of Your Life.” However, were it not for Christopher Nolan, “Arrival” would’ve been a very different movie.
In an interview with Collider, Heisserer reveals that after seeing “Interstellar,” he went and changed the finale of “Arrival,” and frankly, it sounds like a smart edit that he made.
“I would say the only real significant change is the gift that the heptapods leave us with,” he explained. “In earlier versions, they were leaving sort of the blueprints to an interstellar ship, like an ark of sorts. And then Chris Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ came out and all of us got together and said, ‘Well this doesn’t quite work now.’ So we focused more on what we had there in front of us, which was the power of their language.”
“…it was always that in three millennia we would end up being in a place to help them, and in order to have that happen we needed to start colonizing. We needed to start getting off Earth,” he added.
So it sounds like the story pivoted to a more ideological solution than a pragmatic one, and it turns out that was the more poetic way to go. Let us know what you think of the ending in the comments section.
