Summary

• Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi film, Arrival, had to change its original ending due to similarities with Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.
• The original ending of Arrival revealed that the Heptapods provided humans with the blueprints for an interstellar ship, but it was altered to focus on the power of language.
• Arrival's ending change made the movie even better by emphasizing the profound impact of communication and capturing the paradoxical nature of human existence.

Because of Christopher Nolan, the ending of a Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi movie, Arrival, had to be changed - but the change was an improvement for the film. Arrival, Villeneuve's sci-fi film about the arrival of aliens around the planet, and a linguist's work with the military to respond to them, was released in November 2016, but its script was changed thanks to Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar. Despite the change, the Villeneuve movie went on to earn $203 million at the global box office against a budget of $47 million. Although the film is not as mainstream as Nolan's sci-fi flicks, it often gets ranked among the most innovative and narratively complex science-fiction movies ever, and won an Oscar for sound editing.

Director Denis Villeneuve also has several critically acclaimed thriller movies, like Sicario, Prisoners, and Enemy, under his belt. In recent years, he has also garnered recognition and appreciation for helming the Dune movies. However, his $203 million science fiction film remains one of his best works, not only because it got him an Academy Award Best Picture nomination (out of a total of 7 nominations and 1 win) but also because it presented a unique challenge after the premier of a Christopher Nolan film.

Arrival's Original Ending Was Significantly Different

The Heptapod's Left A Blueprint For An Interstellar Ship In The Original Draft

In Arrival's theatrical ending, Amy Adams' Louise Banks publishes a book, The Universal Language, which serves as a guide to learning the unique language of the Heptapods. Before the movie's credits start rolling, it presents a sequence of intertwined scenes from Banks' timeline, highlighting how she perceives time as a loop instead of a line after learning the alien language. She sees how her past, present, and future are inextricably interconnected and how her future tragedies, including her daughter's demise and separation from Donnelly, are inevitable. The movie's ending also keeps the Heptapods' motives shrouded in mystery and only reveals that they taught humans their language because they would need their help after 3000 years.

Although the movie's ending is brilliant, its original script had a significantly different conclusion. As screenwriter Eric Heisserer revealed in an interview (via Collider), the Heptapods left humans with "the blueprints to an interstellar ship" in the original ending of Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi film. Unlike the ending that made it to the movie's final cut, the original one provided a more affirmative explanation for what the Heptapods wanted. It showed how the aliens left humans with "an ark of sorts," foreshadowing an imminent disaster that would threaten humanity. This ending, however, had to be changed because of a Christopher Nolan movie. In the same interview, Heisserer went on to talk about Interstellar, and how the script had to be changed.

then Chris Nolan’s Interstellar came out and all of us got together and said, ‘Well this doesn’t quite work now’ (laughs). So we focused more on what we had there in front of us, which was the power of their language.

Arrival's Ending Had To Be Altered Because Of Interstellar

Interstellar And The Original Arrival Were Both About Interstellar Ship Blueprints

In Interstellar's final arc, Cooper makes the ultimate sacrifice to propel Amelia to a new planet by detaching himself and TARS from their spacecraft and falling into the black hole's event horizon. To his surprise, he and TARS find a five-dimensional tesseract inside the black hole, which was created by future humans (referred to as "them") to help him send quantum data gathered from the inside of the black hole to his daughter. Using this data, his daughter, Murph, solves Dr. Brand's gravitational equation, allowing humans to escape their imminent doom.

Considering how humans eventually leave Earth and live in a space colony in Saturn's orbit after Murph solves the equation, it would be fair to say that Interstellar is fundamentally about future humans providing the blueprint of an interstellar ship for present humans. When Christopher Nolan's Interstellar hit the theaters, screenwriter Eric Heisserer and the filmmakers behind Arrival concluded that their original ending did not work because it seemed too similar to Interstellar's. Therefore, instead of making the movie's ending about humanity finding the blueprints of a spaceship, they focused on what was in front of them: "the power of language."

Interstellar, too, had a bleaker original ending, where the wormhole collapses after Cooper transmits data from inside the black hole.

How Arrival's Ending Change Made The Movie Even Better

Arrival Focuses On The Profound Impact Of Language

Considering how the endings of both Interstellar and Arrival present a temporal paradox, where time becomes a loop, they are arguably quite similar even after Arrival's changed conclusion. At their core, both movies are also about love transcending humanity's perceived limitations of dimensions. However, what makes Arrival's ending memorable is not the grandeur with which it presents these ideas, but the lack thereof. While Interstellar is marked by its epic scale and scintillating visuals of space and time, Arrival is more subtle with its depiction of how the perception of time bends one's reality.

Since both films adopt unique storylines and have their respective merits, it would be unfair to compare them. However, Arrival's ending change made it even better because, unlike Interstellar, its emphasis was never on outer space travel but on the profound impact of language and communication. By sticking to that theme even in its ending moments, Arrival closes on a bittersweet note, perfectly capturing the paradoxical nature of human existence and the age of time.