Notwithstanding the similarity of their premises, the story and the film are different beasts right from the beginning. Along the way she’s accompanied by military overseers and a physicist named Donelly (played by Jeremy Renner in the film). Louise Banks, a linguistics scholar and professor (played by Amy Adams in the film), agrees to help an American team attempt communication with the aliens. It’s difficult to explore the ways Arrival adapts “Story of Your Life” without divulging a few spoilers, but I’ll try to keep the plots of the story and film as secret as possible.īoth open with the inexplicable arrival of an alien species at apparently random points across the globe. In other words, Arrival is not only a fantastic movie, it’s a fantastic adaptation. Despite being anchored in a tender, heartbreaking mother-daughter relationship, it’s easy to see why this isn’t typically the kind of material that makes it to the big screen.Īnd yet not only did Arrival make it to the big screen, it manages to render the complexity of “Story of Your Life” accessible, remain true to the story’s alternately cerebral and humanistic tone and expand the scope of the story in ways that feel logical, exciting and earned. It’s intricately structured, intellectually dense and narratively ambitious, utilizing everything from variational physics to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language to tell the story of first contact between humanity and an alien species. The first time I read “Story of Your Life” I wasn’t sure it could be adapted into any medium, let alone a film. This was one of the many questions I was left pondering after seeing the film Arrival, which is based on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.”
#STORY OF YOUR LIFE TED CHIANG DOWNLOAD MOVIE#
Nowadays the emphasis has shifted to comic books and video games, but in the end little has changed just try to think of the last movie you saw that wasn’t based on something else. So, it’s worth asking: what exactly constitutes a good adaptation? It used to be that producers plundered Broadway and the works of classic literature for material. Hollywood has always been in the adaptation business.