Arrival is not a Sci-Fi movie

@Lycian You obviously don't have the capacity to comprehend the whole point of the movie... that we are not yet evolved enough to perceive all moments in time like the aliens do, and that was the "gift" (misinterpreted as "weapon" by the military) that the aliens gave the women; to experience all moments of her timeline at will.

This isn't science fiction or fantasy, it is quantum reality that we have not been able to even comprehend yet. THAT was the whole point of the movie; that once we all comprehend it, then we can all also realize that it's ridiculous for all of our "nations" to be fighting each other when we are all the same race... the Human Race.

... but I'm sure these words will be wasted on someone like you, who so quickly dismissed the movie as "fantasy" just because you didn't get it.

Spoilers:

I agree ... when the plot unfolds that she can dream the future, it becomes fantasy.

Arrival is most definitely a "Sci-fi" movie, regarding quantum reality and the 4th dimension...

You clearly do not understand the theory behind the 4th dimension or what it would actually entail if we could perceive it.

> The idea in the movie is that you can manipulate the physics of the universe just by thinking. This is called "magic" not science.

Well, in the realm of "sci-fi" you have a pretty wide spectrum. This is hardly the first science-fiction to explore the idea of non-linear time. You would literally have to dismiss every time travel movie made as "not being sci-fi" just because it deals with non-linear time.

I don't even believe that the movie implies that you can "manipulate the physics of the universe just by thinking". I don't think just because she existed in non-linear time that is the same thing as her being able to change the future. We don't even know is she *can* change the future. The concept of a "future" simply doesn't exist anymore.

> Learning a language can change how you think but it can not change how your brain functions.

What's the difference, really?

I would explore the concepts of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the concept of how language effects our perception of time is central to the hypothesis (and the movie, obviously).

For me this was a movie about linguistics, first, and a sci-fi movie second. You could have made a pretty similar movie about an isolated tribe of people in the middle of the Amazon and trying to decipher *their* language.

If you are dismissing the movie as "pure fantasy" then you are being way too limited on your definition of "sci-fi" which is a *very* broad category. The movie doesn't fail as sci-fi just because you disagree about how physics work, especially when so much of higher level physics deals *specifically* with models of time that aren't linear.

Even if you want to come up with some hairbrained definition of "sci-fi" that the movie has to have some sort of real science in it, the movie still succeeds in that about 50% of the movie focuses on the science of linguistics. Just because that's a science that sci-fi doesn't explore very often doesn't make it not sci-fi.