In the science fiction movie ‘Arrival,’ the heroine, Louise Banks, makes a desperate call to Chinese general Shang on his private number to prevent an attack on an alien ship.
By having learned the alien language, she is able to see the future (no, really; it’s advanced linguistics, folks), and thus she knows Shang’s private phone number and the last words of his late wife, the latter used as a way to gain his immediate interest and trust from an otherwise crank call from an American linguist studying the alien language for the meaning of their visit.
It turns out that Shang gives her this information in a future conversation at a function celebrating the successful translation and understanding of humanity about the purpose of this visit (a “non-zero sum game” in which they give us their language, and the concomitant ability to see the future in exchange for our unspecified help 2,000 hence).
In the scene where Shang gives her this information, his wife’s last words appear to be repeated audibly in Mandarin. Since I don’t speak Mandarin I don’t know what his wife’s last words were, which Shang states he would never forget. This seems to be information that might inform the plot of the movie, hence my question.
Does anyone know the last words of Shang’s late wife as repeated in Mandarin in this movie?
Thanks. I actually went to Wiki, read the blurb on the movie looking for just this information, and totally missed the quoted meaning of his wife’s last words.
Yes, but don’t you still want to know what the heptapods want from us in 3,000 years in return for the “gift” of their language? Maybe that, too, I missed on Wiki. Of course, now that we can read the future by learning their language, we will know.
Not everyone can do it. Louise was the only one who became completely immersed, despite all the other scientists (and Ian) around the world studying their language. It’s hinted at in the early dream sequence:
Actually, it’s an incredibly smart and sophisticated ending about the nature of time and life. It’s dealing with greater issues that nearly all SF films of the past 40 years.
It’s about free will and love and loss. It’s confronting the constant of the human condition: choosing to live a life that will contain unknown tragedies by supposing that they might be known tragedies and we would do the same things.
Sure it’s implausible that learning a language would let you experience time differently. Every time travel movie is pretty implausible (except Primer. Whatever it was that happened in that movie, it was totally plausible). Arguably the best time travel movie ever made is about a teenager driving a car with flaming tires into the 1950s so a mad scientist can help him hook his dad up with his mom and catch a lightning bolt home. You gotta let those things go.
This idea is a spinoff of an arcane argument within linguistics, as I understand it, about whether different languages cause your brain to work in a significantly different manner. (I concede that is a layman’s understanding.)
Someone intrigued by linguistics theory wrote this story. I agree that it’s an interesting idea for science fiction, and the “human story” that accompanies it, of Louse’s dilemma regarding her doomed future marriage and daughter (aimed more towards female audience members, I dare to suggest), is not bad as a subplot.
Clearly from some of the comments here, though, the “male” science fiction fan finds this distracting – assuming I understand the objection to the “dumb ending.” Maybe he just wanted a more purist consideration of the implications of the “deal” itself, and, like me, more exploration of exactly what that deal entails in 3,000 years.
I agree, and the quote you provide is the basis for the movie’s premise (as I note less precisely in another comment, below), but, to quibble a bi: presumably, Louise Banks isn’t the ONLY one on earth who can learn the alien language and see the future (though the guy from Berkeley who can’t translate “war” in Sanskrit might not make the cut). Louise is the brilliant leading edge of human understanding of the alien message, including as it does the necessity of seeing the future, but it seems implied to me – or at least logical to assume – that others may acquire her knowledge and capability at some point down the road.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I did read the story that it’s based on. In the story, there’s a second level at work. In some physics problems there is the notion that objects act to minimize or maximize certain quantities: light travels along the path that takes the shortest time, as though it anticipated all the possible routes but picked the quickest one. When Louise gets the ability to see all of time simultaneously, she wonders if humans are like photons and act to maximize or minimize some quality. She knows that she will have a daughter despite that daughter’s early death, and wonders whether she is maximizing her own happiness or sadness. From what I have seen, that idea didn’t make it to the movie.
For the book anyway, I think that it’s this concept that makes for a great story. The en bloc time awareness is just the means to that end, even though it’s a clever hook as well. The book implies that other linguists have the same ability, but nobody talks about it, because they don’t have to/because they never do/because they will not have ever done it.
Well, here’s a data set of 1: I’m male, and to me the whole freakin’ point of the movie is that Louise decides to have her daughter even though she knows the girl will die young and she (Louise) will be heartbroken. Everything else — the aliens, the language, everything — is just a means to get her there.
I don’t think “Louse’s dilemma regarding her doomed future marriage and daughter” is aimed more towards female viewers, and I don’t think it’s a subplot.
What the previous poster (if I may make an assumption here) meant by “dumb ending” is the idea that learning an alien language will enable you to see the future. And yes, it is a dumb idea. But it gets us to Louise’s decision (the whole freakin’ point of the movie), and so I accept it, absurd as it is.
(And personally, I never wondered about what the aliens will want from us in the future … mostly because I’d forgotten that was even part of the deal.)
The point need not be taken too literally: she chooses to enter into a relationship even though chances are it will not work out, chooses to have kids even though anything could happen with them. Note that this explains why she cannot do anything to change anyone’s fate even though she can “see” the future.
I vaguely recall that in the original story she, along with all others who learn the magic language, feels like her entire life, from beginning to end, is scripted and she is merely going through the motions and reading lines, that free will is a complete illusion, enjoys nothing. Kind of a depressing outlook (cf. Slaughterhouse-5), in contrast to which the movie ending is positively optimistic.
My recollection was that ‘free will’ was replaced by a sense of urgency or rightness that led them to act as they already knew they would. So they choose a route through life that maximizes some value and keep to that route, even though the decision was made before they started living the life. Maybe what replaces the value of free will is the opportunity to understand your own motivations at a deeper level. Also, I think the linguists enjoy the good times and regret the bad times just as much as the normals - they just can appreciate all of it simultaneously instead of sequentially.
No, but we can make reasonable inferences about the reaction and a certain differing focus of interest between female vs. male movie goers – hence the terms “chick flick” and “guy flick.” Language develops for a reason beyond power relationships requiring a need for deconstruction and the instruction that to note differences is “weird.”
Some of the commenters seemed to me to be more interested in the technical aspects of language and the alien message in this film, and seemed far less interested in the life experience and human relations subplot. I have no interest in PC policing, so that’s all I have to say on this. Others are free to disagree.