2017-07-07
Your whole life from start to finish
In the past couple of days, i watched quite a few movies, but not many of them made me think about it later. I just saw the movie "Arrival" with actress Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a linguist and mother. I can't even summarize the story, it's just that good. But at the end, it's about how the direction of a language shapes behavior and the perception of life, and going beyond beginnings and endings, because it's limiting what we are capable of thinking.
The alien language is nonlinear, written in circular puffs of smoke, without a beginning or end. The beginning of a sentence contains already the information of the end, because they both exist at the same time. Most movies are told in a linear way, unlike "Arrival", where future and past become one. This is why the story gets a little confusing, because our "Memory is a strange thing, bound by the order of time". Another sentence i liked: "If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"