@volkstraum said:

It's like Gabriel visiting the Virgin Mary, telling her that Jesus' suffering will be the savior of all mankind 3,000 years in the future. But instead he just dies horribly, Joseph is stricken from the record and nothing is resolved. A comet or Wall*E or The Matrix or some other MacGuffin must solve the aliens' plight. But we don't get that part in this gospel.

I'm illiterate when it comes to Christian theology, so I don't understand this paragraph at all.

@volkstraum said:

Moreover, there was no indication that the suffering of the child led to a cure or a discovery or a rebirth or anything that in any way connected to the plight of the aliens 3,000 years in the future.

You are correct. The suffering and death of her child is not related.

I don't find this to be necessarily problematic as the child's death adds to the characterizations of both Dr. Banks and Ian Donnelly. The two are fundamentally different in the way they think about the world and this is what caused the rift in their relationship. So, I can see why the child's death was included in the story.

Banks cares about the journey even if the path will eventually lead to suffering. Donnelly only cares about the destination (suffering) and does not care about the path.

The death of the child has a second goal of addressing existential philosophy. Assuming that you don't believe in an afterlife, death is a source of great suffering. Does that mean that life is not worthwhile if the end is always suffering? Philosophers have disagreements on this matter, just like how Banks and Donnelly disagree in their views.

@volkstraum said:

I guess her reward for bringing twelve nations together is cancer. For some reason.

The reward is the nations coming together and being gifted a new language so that they could all collectively learn the language and advance the human species during the intermediate 3000 years. When the aliens come back to seek humanity's aid in the future, the human race will be far more advanced than they are now and they will therefore have the means to aid the aliens.

The nations had to be brought together before being given the language so that they could learn to be collaborative rather than competitive. The competitiveness was limiting humanity's capacity for advancement. By being collaborative the species can advance faster.

The death of Dr. Bank's child is inconsequential in this particular matter. Whether or not they find a cure for cancer is not important at all.

@Geff said:

The competitiveness was limiting humanity's capacity for advancement. By being collaborative the species can advance faster.

That's a very odd assumption to make. Just about every technological advance in human history was prompted by war and conflict. Wouldn't the aliens have observed this?

We have never lived as a non-competitive species so it's impossible to speculate what would have happened if we lived in a non-competitive environment. Your speculation is that we would never have advanced technologically if we lived as a non-competitive species. This speculation holds some merit, but it's speculation.

The aliens somewhat know the future, due to their unique language. Perhaps they predicted both the outcomes of the human race with either collaboration or competition, and deemed that a collaborative environment would be a more suitable environment to foster the gift of the new language.

I'm not saying competition is necessarily bad. Maybe, as you claim, competition led to all the technological advancements we have now. But, maybe also there is a limit to the benefits of competition. Maybe the aliens recognized the human species to be in the point of development where competition would lead to diminishing returns and might even lead to net negative results, while collaboration would lead to more beneficial results, in terms of rate of advancement.

good points definitely a film that stirs debate

This film made my head hurt!!

All life ends in death... That doesn't mean it's not worth living, in fact, one could argue that it gives us an additional impetus to thrive and appreciate our finite time here... with one another...

That's the existential theme you seem to be missing... the kind of existential feeling that Camus wrote about in The Stranger (classic novella)... in the first part of the film Louise seems to be in a similar state to the main character in Camus' story, a bit too detached from what's going on around her... also, in this film we face an existential crisis as a species, or rather the Arrival (pun intended) of the aliens shows us that we already are in this state...

Then coming together and having a child knowing the consequences, her birth, life and death is all symbolic of what's going on at the global level in the movie and interwoven with it..

It's a beautiful film...

I really liked this article, including an interview with the screenplay author, which gives a good understanding of how the film's plot turned out in comparison to the original short story:- https://taylorholmes.com/2016/11/12/movie-arrival-explained-interview-eric-heisserer/

There's a kind of irony I found in that they had to change their script due to an element of the storyline in Interstellar - the very thing which made that film make no sense to me - which ultimately lands up helping Arrival.

Also, leaving the aliens' reason for helping us a vague issue for the future was a smart move - the original idea there would have dealt this film a similar plot hole to Interstellar...

@elliotthomas97 said:

This film made my head hurt!!

Lol, I found this movie to be fairly straightforward. If you REALLY want to make your head hurt watch The Wailing (2016). It took me 3-4 days of almost constant thinking about the movie to finally figure out wtf was really going on. I still haven't figured out everything. Unlike The Arrival, that movie is intentionally misleading. Some characters lie, a lot. You have to figure out who is lying and who is telling the truth.

Luckily for you, I wrote a long and comprehensive explanation about the movie in that movie's discussion section, if you can't figure it out yourself (I recommend you try figuring it out yourself before reading the explanation).

That movie is NOT open to interpretation as some people claim. It has a clear message and a clear course of events if you manage to analyze it correctly.