10 Best Sci-Fi Movie Endings Of All Time

Humans' first contact with extraterrestrials has been explored tonnes in sci-fi, but no other movie has explored it in such a way as Denis Villeneuve's Arrival. The idea of sending a linguist to make first contact with a new species as opposed to just soldiers with guns seems like a no-brainer. After all, what better way to communicate with alien life than sending a professor of language?

At the very start of the film we see linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) lose her daughter to an incurable illness, shortly followed by the breakup of her marriage. It's a bleak start for any film, but it's not until the final scenes that we discover that it wasn't the start at all. In fact, it hasn't even happened yet.

Thanks to learning the seven-limbed heptapods language, Louise is able to perceive time in a non-linear fashion like they do, meaning that the birth of her daughter is still yet to happen, let alone her death.

It's a beautifully sombre end that comes to a close when she realises that the physicist Ian (Jeremy Renner) she's been working with is her husband who will eventually leave her, yet despite knowing the outcome, she still wants to take the journey.