"I suddenly remembered that a morphological relative of 'performative' was 'performance,' which could describe the sensation of conversing when you knew what would be said: it was like performing in a play."
...
"Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death."
The movie left this key message out almost entirely.
I include Arrival alongside Children of Men as an example of a case where the movie is better than the book (and I'm a big Ted Chiang fan) - changing the daughter's death from a climbing accident to a disease was much better imo.
This means that if the daughter had died in a climbing accident in the film, the mother would have to have chosen to let that happen/not warn her, whereas to avoid the disease, the only option would have been not to have the child. In the book, that wasn't an option; learning the language changed her subjective experience of time, but did not give a superpower.
In the case of a disease, there's really nothing she can do, and iirc the film implies the hard choice here was to decide to have a child even knowing that will die.
In the car of an accident, there is the feeling that she could literally have prevented her daughter's death by preventing the accident, but "chooses" not to. The free will implications of that are much more interesting imo.
(To be clear, it's one of my favorite stories and also one of my favorite movies.)
