I've had this bubbling inside of me for months simply because I could not fathom the sheer immensity of bringing justice to my favorite movies this year. I was reviewing production set design for Arrival when comments under a video "explaining" its ending pissed me off. My brain is pulling me in all sorts of directions at speeds my fingers could not possibly humanly match up to, and it's 2 in the morning on a weekday. No promises for justice here. I gotta get this out of my body.

Prestige and acclaim aside, the Stories That Mattered to me, and why, [what was supposed to be] briefly explained.

"Arrival"

A self-proclaimed marriage between science and romance by way of screenplay, this sci-fi thriller is what I like to think of as lofty, and deliciously easy for an ambidextrous thinker to sink their teeth into, a sort of nutritious cotton candy - my favorite since Her. Definitely not the same level of brilliantly, cerebrally spiritual, but cute and easy enough consumption for 118 minutes nonetheless. As someone who saw right through the prologue of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress but was obsessed enough to read it all the way through anyway, I fully appreciated the cryptological references and mind-blowing ending for Arrival.

One of my favorite parts of the movie is when Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) explains that when learning a new language, one begins to understand the way in which the language is constructed - for Abbott and Costello, not only is this non-linear, but also ambidextrous. To say it takes quite a highly intelligent being to be able to write with both hands know precisely when to end with a clear-cut message is an understatement. I mean c'mon - have you ever tried to write a letter by hand? We write in one direction and I end up wasting stationery when I forget to remember my margins!

Furthermore, as the movie gains momentum, we understand more and more why the sequences of editing (writing this article gave me one more epiphany on the Oscars, by the way, toot toot!) don't make sense. Scenes cut like Memento, but it isn't the same plot line, so what is it? In order to understand this, I will explain to you the most basic way I can how the construct of time is theorized to exist. Thanks to Lynne Ewing and William Sleator - fantasy reads from opposite ends of my pubescence (cringe), I understood what was going on. You see, if you were to try to read Einstein, Feynman or Hawking's explanations, they would tell you that time exists all at once; past, present, and future are all simultaneous, as they never truly become one another. Huh?

Exactly. Due to, uh, time restraints, let's keep this as short as possible. What if I told you that events in time can exist like the drops of water in a pond? They're all there, simultaneously, and yet - should one ripple occur, the rest of the pond is altered in some way. Now, the statement that pissed me off in the comments was that the movie was about time perception and not travel.

FIRST of all, I will not even begin to attempt to mansplain an understanding of a branch of science that is still continuously evolving and translating itself to the layperson's view. Until absolutes are absolutely dealt with, everything is fair game, and for the love of God, please respect the English language, thorns and all. (Funnily enough, I think that was the point of the whole movie. Sweet or perhaps passive-aggressive kind of commentary on the human race and its faults - you can be a Dr. Banks and leave your mind wide open, or go spastic over human constructs and miss out like Ian Donnelly. Your choice either way.) In my eyes, the perception of time perception and travel are the same. Hear me out.

Back to our simultaneous time pond. You can look at the pond at any one perspective from above the pond, but if you are a creature IN the pond, you can only see your point of view. Now, for the sole purpose of understanding, let's liken the creatures from above the pond to the heptapods, Abbott and Costello. And let's liken Dr. Banks and the rest of us pithy humans to tiny bits of ironwood needles, no, weeds on the surface of a pond, like drawings on paper. Imagine that you are a weed stick figure who can only see the lines immediately around you.

This way, you are a linear being, with only a linear way of seeing the world: you can only see things as they present themselves on that flat sheet of paper or simple surface plane of the pond. Our entire world is constricted to and made up by the tiny needles floating lightly on the surface of the pond, but we don't know that, not yet at least. However, if you were Abbott and Costello, and were living in a NON-LINEAR dimension, where you could see above AND below the surface of the pond, you would be able to see everything that was happening, all at once.

You as an outsider, clumsily encumbered by the familiarity of a different world also would not be able to simply change how things occur without fucking something up royally. Anyhow, to a needle-human-person's POV this IS time travel AND perception, as we live in our immediate world and cannot change things beyond it without some insight beyond our given capabilities. As beings built-in with that capability, it is a matter of perception only to Abbott and Costello. Thanks to the open-mindedness and ability to entertain a thought without accepting it as absolute concrete fact (don't even get me started on concrete matter) of both ends, Dr. Banks was capable of understanding the tip of a whole new world. So no, don't fucking tell me this movie has nothing to do with time travel. Simply put, you don't know that. Anyway.

With these frameworks in mind, imagine that these two worlds existed as they were; unchangeable. Now imagine something terrible was about to happen to you, and you could not reach into the surface of the pond, but really needed a simple single aspect of the little needle arrangements to be altered. Just a teensy bit, so painstaking, so small in relation to your own existence, yet so sensitive. Like needing a family of water striders to move one in a house of cards just the slightest bit. What do you do?

You ask.

And because this event is so precarious, so miniscule, yet so powerful it could potentially bring your entire species down to its knees, you not only ask, you ask nicely, knowing all the while that time, this maddening construct that it is, is still of the essence, even to someone of your magnificent ilk. How would you travel to the world of needles and ask that their trigger-happy selves quit bickering and killing each other for a second, and make a bargain with you? Thin ice here, buddy. Better make sure your allusory semi-ovary, red-blood-cell-shaped vessel is traceless and eco-friendly, too.

Well, you get them to collaborate. And how else can you do that, but to show them the truth; what you, and they are capable of, together. Because I know that if someone were to come up to me, no matter WHAT they looked like, I would be loath to trust in their words at face value.

And here come falling in the chips of the epiphany.

Amy understanding "heptapod" non-linear speak and thus, using it as a tool, or gift of their language, and not a "weapon," to convince the Chinese president General Shang "In war, there are no winners, only widows." Beautiful. Romantic and sort of an ouroboros (not unlike the shape of the heptapod alphabet!) in its meaning - not only for the stakes at hand and all the logic that comes with it, but for the time General Shang's wife said it, for his ears only. And why would she have said it? Tale as old as time?

And on and on, as the ripples in a pond. It all sorta comes full-circle. Ok, done with the puns. But seriously. "Hepta," meaning seven - and all the ways it ties in with Dr. Banks and the rest of this excellent story. Twelve semi-ovoid pods, put together forming six whole, perhaps alluding to the human race being the seventh piece of the puzzle, or Seventh Day, or Seven Deadly sins, among other things, if you're a scholar of the scribes - the symbolism of a technically "higher" being prevailing. Good thing they weren't octopods, because the other perspectives would have been infinite. Groan.

(By the way, I just Googled what the politically appropriate term to call the Chinese dude in the movie was and found that I used literary tools to explain Bayes' and Snell's law. Prior to the last paragraph, I had no idea what these laws were. Hooray for all those books my Mum constantly told me to stop reading so much as a kid. And a deep thank you to all my teachers who nurtured and honed my understanding of "nuances" growing up. I hold it down for Saipan!)

All in all, this was not truly an alien invasion movie but rather, a thought-provoking piece on humanity, time, and space, so to speak. A story built around a single human and the impact her way of thinking made in the proverbial and literal universe. Minus the weird plot parts with China flipping out of nowhere to cause a catalystic conflict, for which I forgive them because they would have run out of time to use well otherwise. Ha-ha.

Symbolism. Literature. Science. The science of literature, and the literature of science. Yaaay. Confetti.. Wow, I have two more movies to go. Goddammit. I'll continue this tomorrow. Or whenever another emotional spurt of energy hits me hard enough to want to disguise my rants in my favorite parts of a movie. Peace.