15 Sci-Fi Movie Endings That Would Have Changed Everything

15. Arrival (2016)

Arrival arrived in Denis Villeneuve’s transitional period, when he had the artistic capital to attract big stars and command midweight budgets, but was still on his journey to becoming a household name. And it has all the hallmarks that define the director’s recent career, namely: philosophical and complex human stories set against a backdrop of grand, jaw-dropping spectacle.

Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner are linguist Louise Banks and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly, called in to investigate and attempt to communicate with the extraterrestrial inhabitants of gigantic hovering spacecraft that have mysteriously arrived on Earth. The pair get up close and personal with the so-called Heptapods, researching and attempting to decode their complex written language.

The original script for the film had the Heptapods communicate blueprints to an interstellar ship that would provide a way to leave Earth in the face of imminent, planet-threatening disaster. And then Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar dropped.

Shaken by the similarity of the films, screenwriter Eric Heisserer had to re-tool his script to ensure Arrival remained its own thing, digging deeper into the language aspect instead. Thus, the film as we know it ends with Louise using the aliens’ language to experience memories of the future (just go with it), which allow her to prevent humanity from descending into devastating conflict and achieve global unity.  And, at least on the macro scale, all is well.