“Story of Your Life” is a short story written by Ted Chiang in which the heroine Louise Banks recalls how she deciphered the language systems of the aliens, heptapods, and communicated with them. Apart from this chronological storyline, there is another parallel storyline in which Louise depicts her future life moments with her daughter in a non-sequential way as if she was talking to her daughter. These glimpses into the future are caused by her mastery of heptapods’ semagram, which changes her mode of awareness. In 2016, director Denis Villeneuve adapted this short story into a science fiction film named Arrival, which maintains many elements of Chiang’s story but also makes notable changes to fit into adaptation criteria. Thus, this paper will demonstrate that Arrival is successful both as a film and an adaptation because of its carefully designed narrator, revised plot, and newly invented elements.

the cover page of "Story of Your Life" (retrieved from Internet)

Arrival adopts a new focalization suitable for the screen, using the camera as the narrator to extract the core story from the original text. Based on Genette’s narrative discourse theory, Chiang’s short story adheres to “fixed internal focalization” (Stam 39). Louise, as a first-person narrator, has already realized her ability to foresee the future experiences with her daughter. However, in the film, the camera takes over the main work of the narrator and adopts “external focalization” with a limited point of view while still following Louise’s encounter (Stam 39). As Linda Seger said, the film cannot show the audience a subjective experience, but offer objective visual scenes and auditory sounds (44). This theory explains that the change of the focalization in this film is due to the limitations of a visual medium, while the narrator’s change from “omniscient” to “limited perspective” is to highlight the film’s advantages. In order to create a suitable character arc for Louise, this film reconstructs her omniscient perspective into a limited one, requiring the camera follows her as she investigates the real meaning of her “memory” scenes about a little girl. Such a change renders the mysterious atmosphere and tension and allows audiences to penetrate Louise’s thoughts. Further, instead of knowing those flashes of “memories” are actually flashforwards at the beginning, Louise and the audience need to experience a steady flow of revelation that only comes to light when the suspense is felt to climax.

the trailer of Film Arrival (retrieved from YouTube)

Although the camera cannot capture Louise’s inner thoughts, the POV shots and voice-over narration are adopted to externalize the “reflective voice” (Seger 45). For instance, the two-minute voice-over at the beginning of the film – “moment is a strange thing…And this was the end. Like the day they arrived” (Chiang 2) converges with Louise’s internal monologue in the short story – “I know how this story ends…I also think a lot about how it began, when ships appeared in meadows” (Arrival 1:52-4:15). Praiseworthily, when Louise’s voice-over is played, the film presents objective scenes about her and her daughter, which is not contradictory to the voice-over. So, it deftly eliminates the worries that the voice-over will weaken the story’s credibility. Additionally, almost all the close-ups related to heptapods are POV shots: the ink painting-like written language, their physical features, and their nuance movements. These shots allow the audience to grasp the details through Louise’s eye and feel Louise’s emotions firsthand.

Arrival also re-creates a more compact and explicit plot, which makes it a laudable film and adaptation. “Story of Your Life” employs the nonlinear narrative technique, starting the narration with the night that Louise is pregnant, and further interweaving the main story line – her past experience about heptapods – with her future experience with her daughter. Contrarily, this film adjusts its narrative starting point to be the day when heptapods arrive and applies “prolepses” to unfold the story about Hannah (Stam 32). According to Seger’s theory, the narrator in the novel could move between the past, the present, and the future flexibly, but doing so would be disruptive in the film (52). Thus, it supports the reason for constructing the events in a more sequence-oriented manner in this film. Due to the timely nature, this adaptation can only turn the memories with heptapods into what is being experienced. Meanwhile, there is no complete storyline about Hannah, but the montage series inserted at the beginning and sprinkles through the rest of the story.

As Hutcheon states, in the film adaptation, “themes must always serve the story action” (62). As a plot-driven adaptation, Arrival achieves a more convincing plot not only by rearranging the series of events but also by changing specific settings. The alteration of Hannah’s death is the strongest evidence. In the original story, Louise’s daughter dies at the age of 25 in a mountaineering accident (Chiang 31). This death is meant to highlight the theme of “free will and determinism.” But its setting is flawed since it provides the possibility for Louise to prevent her daughter from dying from an accident after she has foreseen it. What the story desires to convey is that even if Louise already has a simultaneous thinking mode and could know the future, the cause and result of all matters are fixed and coexisting, which means that she only has the right to embrace it rather than changing it. Thus, the film changes the age and cause of her daughter’s death to make it more reasonable: Hannah dies of a terminal illness in her teens (Arrival 3:44). The setting of incurable disease avoids the ambiguity that Louise has free will to change the future. It also echoes Louise’s saying at the end, “Despite knowing the journey, and where it leads, I embrace it. And I welcome every moment of it,” which reflects the tragic but warm and powerful “determinism” (Arrival 01:46:36-01:46:45). Another reason for such change is related to the visual characteristics of films. As Seger says, the film shows the story through images (39). So, if this film still takes 25 as the age of death, then Louise must dress up older. However, such visual cues will directly destroy the suspense of flash-forwards in the film, making the reversal meaningless.

Some people might argue that there are moments of weakness in this film because Louise’s realization process of heptapods’ written language, detailed in “Story of Your Life” for seven pages, is replaced by only three-minute montage series. However, this moment that seems to hinder the effectiveness is a necessary adjustment in order to bring the essence of the text into the cinematic realm. Based on Genette’s concept of “narrative speed,” the pace of the film’s narration is determined by the relationship between the story time and the discourse time (Stam 32). In Arrival, the brief montage sequence suggests that its discourse time is less than storytime, which is a change made after considering how the two coincide. In this case, the process of learning the aliens’ language is not the focus of the film. Meanwhile, the montage already summarizes the essence of the original text through a highly efficient exposition, the intense density of information, and a continuous voice-over explanation. More specifically, key points of Louise’s discovery such as “their written language has no forward or backward direction,” “Linguists call this nonlinear orthography,” and “you have to know each word and how much space they would occupy before writing” are all emphasized during this montage piece (Arrival 56:26-59:45). Besides, based on the consideration that getting the exposition out at several times will hold back the story, condensing the source story event into a 3-minute clip is a reasonable choice to achieve an appropriate speed for plot development.

Added elements and foreshadowing are also incorporated into this film, helping the story become more appealing and easy-to-understand. Orson Welles once claimed that “If one has nothing new to say about a novel, why to adapt it at all,” which emphasizing the importance of creativity for an adaptation (Stam 16). Arrival meets such expectations because it finds the right balance between intertextuality and creativity, which polishes the source story. For example, in the original story, readers may question how the connection between language acquisition and predicting future works. Some readers even think that Louise’s ability to know the future could change her present status. But this film adds a dialogue between Louise and General Shang, which effectively resolves this confusion. In the film, Louise is guided by her premonition that she needs to say “war doesn’t make winners, only widows” in her call to appeal to Chinese General Shang, thus reversing the whole world’s situation (Arrival 01:41:46-01:42:21). This new event is a perfect illustration of the practical implications of non-causality, namely that the cognitions for the future and the current behavior are coexistent and stable.

Another desirable invented element is a clear purpose of heptapods’ arrival. In the source text, whenever Louise’s team asks why the aliens came to earth, they don’t explain the reasons directly, but keep repeating “to see,” or “to observe” (Chiang 17). Such a hazy answer causes the audience to be puzzled. But as a plot-oriented film, clarifying the purpose is necessary to drive the development and completion of the whole story. So, the heptapods in this film replies Louise that they come to give humans their gift of language because humans would rescue them after 3000 years (Arrival 01:30:18-01:31:50). Moreover, when asking for heptapods’ purpose, their “confusing” answer – “use weapon,” which actually means “use language” – is considered as an essential plot point (Arrival 01:06:46). This answer leads Louise’s colleagues to misinterpret that the heptapods are intent on attacking earth. While rationalizing the story, this element motivates the conflict between humans and heptapods, and thus strengthens the inner tension of the film. More specifically, subsequent events in the film, such as the disruption of communications around the world, the placement of explosives on craft by American soldiers, and the preparation by China and Russia to attack the heptapods, are all triggered by this new element – clarifying the purpose for arrival. Thus, adding the purpose further caters to the need for audio-visual media to bring more fluctuations to the audience than text media. It echoes Seger’s theory that the elucidating of the purpose accelerates the film to reach the standard of success, “integrating and reveling” (33).

Additionally, this film applies many foreshadowing to illuminate the story line. For instance, when Louise and her partner Ian enter the alien craft for the first time, they don’t fall even if they stand perpendicular to the ground (Arrival 28:20). Also, in one flashforward moment, Louise tells her daughter that her name is special because “Hannah” is the same whether it is written forward or backward (Arrival 01:47:09-01:47:32). These two details are the elaborate clues, which hints that the language of heptapods is different from that of humans and its core principles of teleology.

All the evidence shows that the film Arrival tweaks, deletes, or condenses many elements in “Story of Your Life,” while also balances the core theme and storyline in the short story. These attempts are vital actions to match the visual and audio medium, contributing Arrival to turn into a successful film adaptation.

Works Cited

Arrival. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Paramount Pictures, 2016.

Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life”. Stories of Your Life and Others (e-book ed.). Picador, 2002.

Hutcheon, Linda and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2013.

Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film. Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1866.

Stam, Robert and Alessandra Raengo. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005.