What is the science fiction masterpiece that forced the production team of ``The Arrival'' to change the ending?

The genealogy of science fiction movies in which a higher being bestows “power” on humanity and the “signs” that are passed down.

The first movie you can't miss is ` `2001: A Space Odyssey '' (1968), a masterpiece created by director Stanley Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. The appearance of a monolith resembling a black slate on the earth in primitive times causes the affected human monkeys to use animal bones as weapons. Furthermore, monoliths appear on the moon and near Jupiter, where modern space exploration has begun, as if to guide human evolution.

"Interstellar" introduced artificial intelligence robots TARS and CASE, which look similar to monoliths. And, of course, the elongated black spaceship in ``The Arrival'' is oval in shape, but the way it rises slightly above the ground is reminiscent of a monolith. In this way, the image that evokes a monolith also functions as a "sign" that inherits "a story in which a higher being bestows power on humanity."

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`` Contact '' (1997), based on a novel by Carl Sagan and directed by Robert Zemeckis, also fits into this category. Ellie (Jodie Foster), a researcher on the SETI project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, receives radio waves from an alien. Based on the blueprints obtained by deciphering this, an interspace transportation device is built, and Ellie climbs aboard. In the movie, the second interspace transport device that Ellie pilots is built in Hokkaido, but in ``The Arrival'', as an homage to ``Contact'', Hokkaido is selected as one of 12 locations around the world where heptapod spaceships appear. It was. This can also be said to be a sign that they have inherited the same story type.

Not all gifts are good