20 Things You Didn't Know About Arrival

It is not uncommon for films to reference other movies of their ilk, and Arrival is no different. It pays homage to sci-fi classics in several ways, especially those that have initial communication between humans and aliens as a key part of their narratives.

The film’s most overt homages are about Contact (a picture written by Carl Sagan himself) and Star Trek: First Contact. They are referenced when it is revealed that there are alien ships in Hokkaido (where the secret spacecraft was constructed in the former film) and Montana (where the first point of contact between humans and aliens was made in the latter film).

Another (possibly unintentional) reference is Colonel Weber, as played by Forest Whitaker. Arrival was not the first time Whitaker played a character who was involved in the recruitment of experts in order to establish first contact. In the 1995 film Species, he plays Dan Smithson, a telepath who is recruited as a part of a team to stop a newly emerged alien threat.