One of my favorite films about aliens is ArrivalĀ (2016), based onĀ Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (1998). It portrays otherworldly visitors as enlightened extraterrestrials with a literally timeless grasp of language and causality. Aside from being spacefaring travellers and inhabiting spacecraft that leave no residue, traces, or pollution, the advanced creatures of Arrival perceive time […]