Published Jan 31, 2026, 6:45 PM EST
Dhruv is a Lead Writer in Screen Rant's New TV division. He has been consistently contributing to the website for over two years and has written thousands of articles covering streaming trends, movie/TV analysis, and pop culture breakdowns.
Before Screen Rant, he was a Senior Writer for The Cinemaholic, covering everything from anime to television, from reality TV to movies.
After high school, he was on his way to become a Civil Engineer. However, he soon realized that writing was his true calling. As a result, he took a leap and never looked back.
One of the greatest opening lines in sci-fi movie history is from Denis Villeneuve's Arrival:
"I used to think this was the beginning of your story."
Movies about aliens and extraterrestrial beings often unfold as horror flicks that walk through apocalyptic battles between humans and creatures with higher intelligence. At its core, Arrival, too, is a story about humanity's first contact with alien beings. However, the movie rises far above the tropes of the genre and uses aliens as a device to capture humanity's ego and faith in its limited knowledge and perception.
The above quote, spoken by Amy Adams' Dr. Louise Banks, perfectly captures this theme by hinting that the film is less about extraterrestrials and more about humanity’s fractured relationship with time, memory, and certainty.
Arrival’s Opening Lines Make You Question Your Perception Of Time
By confessing how she wrongly believed that "this was the beginning of your story," Amy Adams' character hints to a viewer that they are not watching the movie's beginning. For a first-time viewer, this opening line raises many questions surrounding the timeline of Arrival's events. However, before one can ponder over these, the character criticizes our limited understanding of time, which, in turn, affects how we define memories.
"I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Memory is a strange thing. It doesn't work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order."
Only when the movie unfolds and Amy Adams' Dr. Louise starts seeing time as nonlinear and malleable does the full weight of her opening statement become clear. As her linear perception of time gradually dwindles, the beginning of her story melts into the end and memories become both reminders of the past and projections of the future.
She realizes that for a long time, she, like other humans, was bound not only by her linear perception of time but by the prison of her past choices and the uncertainty of the future. However, when the limitations finally disappear, she understands that life’s meaning is not confined to cause and effect but woven across the entirety of experience.
The Quote Perfectly Captures The Movie’s Take On The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
There is a lot to take from Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, but the movie's core sci-fi concept focuses on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (also known as Linguistic Relativity). In linguistics, the hypothesis states that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition.
Taking this concept to a sci-fi extreme, Arrival shows how learning a non-linear form of written language from an alien species allows linguist Dr. Louise to rewire her brain and perceive time non-linearly.
If humans are seen as machines, language, in Arrival, is portrayed as a software that gets a massive upgrade after learning the aliens' form of communication. An upgrade in software leads to a complete change in perception, which reduces the past, the present, and the future to one singular event, where all three unfold at once.
This change in perception of time also alters how one defines memories, explaining why Louise acknowledges:
Memory is a strange thing. It doesn't work like I thought it did.
Arrival’s Opening Quote Perfectly Ties Into Its Moving Ending
Arrival's opening sequence features scenes in which Louise spends time with her daughter. However, the daughter suddenly disappears from the narrative as if she never existed in the first place. The film's ending ultimately reveals that what viewers saw in the beginning was a glimpse of Louise's future.
With this, just as Louise connects the dots with her newfound perception of the fluidity of time and realizes how she must embrace her life as a complete tapestry despite knowing that certain choices will bring immense pain, a viewer also understands that the story they thought was linear is actually cyclical.
As a result, before Arrival's credits start rolling and one sees Louise's past and future perfectly merge with one another, it becomes hard not to repeat her words from the beginning:
"I used to think this was the beginning of your story."
English (US) ·