Really not very bright
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yeamf-93422 — 9 years ago(February 02, 2017 02:46 PM)
She said, "
I knew about something bad happening, and I told your father. And he thinks I made the wrong choice.
" or something like that I think the wrong choice was not telling him sooner, or, telling him at all. -
gulian-1 — 9 years ago(February 02, 2017 04:49 PM)
"I told him something that
he wasn't ready to hear.
What?
Well
Believe it or not
I know something thats going to happen.
I can not explain how I know it,
I just do.
And when I told your daddy, he
got really mad"
Given the circumstances and what she was and is able to do, the father "got really mad", why not, but It is not credible that she wait to tell hime or no tell at all, nor that he would leave her because of the disease of their daughter.
Some elements like this one ruins the movie.s -
mrdaev — 9 years ago(February 02, 2017 06:57 PM)
To me, the "wrong choice" was to decide to have a child with him knowing that the child would die (and not telling him at the time she decided to try to have a child with him)
I could see the husband being upset that she didn't give him a chance to be part of the decision to have a child knowing she would die young.
But yeah. The movie was a substantial disappointment overall. Aside from the blatant and clumsy emotional manipulation with the dying child plot line. The plot was just nonsensical. If learning the Alien language (even after the critical point - ie, she didn't fully learn it until after the Alien crisis that took place for most of the movie) meant that one could eventually step out of time and experience one's life events in any order, then she may as well have been able to tap into that knowledge the moment she first learned of the Arrival (or even before).
Or are we supposed to be content at the presumption that when her Alien barfed out 1/6 of the secret to their language, she was able to glean just enough to become unstuck in time? Cause that's not really how it played out in the film - she needed her future knowledge to make sense of that 1/6 bit
I think we are supposed to come away with the understanding that her strong emotional tie to the future (experiences with her daughter) somehow acted as a catalyst to her learning of the Alien language - to sort of allow her to learn it enough to get her time unsticking abilities before she actually learned it or something along those lines. But I sure didn't come away convinced that this was portrayed very plausibly.
So it goes -
yeamf-93422 — 9 years ago(February 02, 2017 09:43 PM)
I think that sort of makes Ian's character a bad guy. I don't think it's really about deciding to keep the child, since I'm sure he would want to keep the child. Some Aliens coming to earth to give you the ability to see the future in which your daughter dies is not a good enough reason to not have the kid. Then she decides to have the baby anyways, and he's happy with the baby, and suddenly, she tells him that the kid will die in a few years and he just, bolts? What a dick!
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TaanStari — 9 years ago(February 03, 2017 09:10 AM)
But the reason for divorce wasnt that the kid was dying, but that she knew the whole time and didnt tell him. Would you be able to live with someone who knowingly puts you and your daughter through such emotional trauma?
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cdm0061 — 9 years ago(February 03, 2017 08:18 AM)
This is something that is bothering me more the more I think about it.
Did she only see one possible future after learning the heptapod language and that future involved having Hannah so she chose to keep Hannah's untimely death from Ian to keep him around long enough to make it happen that way?
Or did she see multiple possible futures?
Was having Hannah the only way to meet General Shang in the future and be able to unite humanity with the Heptapods in the present?
It might have been interesting if the movie had presented alternate futures(via Louise's flashforwardses) in which she decides not to have the child, or tells Ian about the child's short lifespan before conception and he decides not to have the child. Maybe Louise's life would have been worse(by her standards).
If there was only one future she sawthat would just be an awful mind trip to know your future and could see the bad things coming from years away, but were powerless or too scared to deviate from the path. -
jeffjohnston-13327 — 9 years ago(February 06, 2017 11:52 PM)
You're falling into the linear time trap.
In this story, time happens all at once. We humans only perceive it linearly. Humans are like travelers riding a bus down a road in heavy fog. We know what we passed, but can't see what's ahead. The aliens see the whole road map, all at once. There's no alternate map. Glimpsing the map won't allow you to rearrange it or the route the bus takes. -
iggnir — 9 years ago(February 07, 2017 08:44 AM)
Then how do you explain the thing with the chinese general at the end? You theory makes a lot of sense, only for this huge mistake that ruins everything for me. What could have been a fantastic movie ends up being another cheap SF flick
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jeffjohnston-13327 — 9 years ago(February 07, 2017 10:14 AM)
He said what he said because he's always said it. It was already on the map.
Or at least he had to say it or it would have altered the time-line and there would have been a war. He feels
compelled
to give her the information in the future. Like Bill and Ted making a note that at some point in the future they'll swipe the car keys they need in the present, go back in time, and hide them behind the bush. Then, they look behind that bush and (ta-da!) there are the keys.
In this case, the general was never implicitly told to give Louise the information at some point in the future but he expresses that he feels that he
must
and that that's the main reason he's at the ceremony. He seems to have free will and could choose not to but
something
has been telling him that he
REALLY REALLY should
. -
iggnir — 9 years ago(February 08, 2017 01:25 AM)
Indeed, I'm ok with the whole "I feel like I need to give you this info", although it's quite far fetched. What I have trouble with is that she chooses to use this information to change the future. It means that she decides to suffer through her whole life, knowing that she could just change it by using info from the future? Or rather knowing that she could have changed things, but that it just didn't happen because the future is already written? It doesn't make a lot of sense
That's not a gift, that's a bloody curse for me. The human mind is just not designed for this kind of stuff And another very important point: the aliens main aim is to teach their language to humanity, in order to give them the gift of prescience (or wholescience or whatever). Knowing that humans can use this gift to modify the future, what happens when everyone has learned it? Does it mean that everyone is doomed to accept the future as it is? Unlikely Someone less inclined to suffer like the main protagonist will always try to modify the future. But what happens to the memories of other people then? Wouldn't it be a mess very quickly? Or do the momeries adapt for everyone as the future changes?
Although I understand your point, I feel that this theory of yours (that's quite widely accepted it seems) doesn't quite work. It really is a pity, because I was really enjoying the movie until the big twist at the end
P.S. Sorry for my bad english. I'm always trying to improve it, but I think that's quite hopeless at this point -
jeffjohnston-13327 — 9 years ago(February 08, 2017 11:29 AM)
First: Your English is excellent so stop apologizing to people about that.
Second: I apologize if I repeat myself here. I've been discussing this in other posts.
I make two points though, or rather I offer two possibilities:- Free will is an illusion and everything the characters did was preordained, which doesn't seem like much fun.
or - The characters had free will but there was a planned path for them to follow. I lean more toward this hypothesis. Louise seems to make a conscious decision to embrace Ian, setting her on the path she saw ahead.
Just as someone who can see a road on the map is still free to choose to drive their car into the ditch instead, Louise could have deviated from her route through time. But this would have meant erasing her child. (If you knew that your child would die around the age of 15 would you go back in time and prevent your child from being conceived? Or would you embrace the 15 years you would share with your child?) Louise seems to decide that the wonderful journey is worth the sh*tty destination. Remember that Louise is seeing the flash-forwards as (presumably precious) memories.
As for the general; He "knows" that he has to give Louise the information she needed in the past. It confuses him, but it feels right to him. I imagine that he could choose to "run his car off the road" by choosing to not give Louise the information, but he "knows" that's the wrong thing to do. He might not know where the road leads, but he's pretty sure that driving off it is a bad idea.
So, there seems to be varying levels of temporal awareness depending on the character's understanding of Hepapod and/or their contact with Louise through her clairvoyance:
- Louise clearly sees the future.
- The general has a sense of his role in a causal loop.
- Ian doesn't have a clue, but seems happy to accept that all's well that ends well when the aliens depart.
- Free will is an illusion and everything the characters did was preordained, which doesn't seem like much fun.
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n-j-toner — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 09:48 AM)
To cdm0061
That's the problem with saying time is non-linear for the aliens, they live their whole lives knowing the beginning to the end. It's a glossed over point, especially the ignored question of the alien's lifespan as they can 'see' 3,000 years into the future. I don't think enough was made of the point that if everyone looked far enough ahead and worked together the world would be a better place.
I'm not a fan of loops as a resolution anyway. So I fully agree with the need for alternative future flashes.
I think largely I'm disappointed that in the end it wasn't really sci-fi, it was an interesting personal drama with aliens in it. Renner's character was there to ask science questions, but none of them ever got answered. I don't need every question answered, but there's no functioning alien species in my head, or a distinct resolution to the acceptance of their gift.
And to all those claiming that folks who don't like this want only the Independence Day/Guardians of the Galaxy kind of sci-fi, I'd like a solution that is actually clever rather than just 'theoretically possible'
Dum Spiro Spero -
matttjonez — 9 years ago(February 03, 2017 09:26 AM)
Those events are all determined. The gift of the heptapod language didn't give her the ability to alter her fate, only the ability to know it and experience her life simultaneously unaffected by the passage of time that we know as humans.
So, she had to have the child. She had to tell Ian about their daughter's death. He had to leave. And she had to know she would have to do this, because it's her life story, and it's still a pre-determined course of events. She resigns herself to this reality. The illusion of free will is completely erased once you are unconstrained by the linearity of time.
This is actually one of the things the film can explain. -
organicnegation — 9 years ago(February 03, 2017 11:55 PM)
Here's the problem with this, though. The illusion of free will is the only thing that makes human life possible. It is inconceivable that she would live without this illusion, and that she would take pleasure in life in the process. You also can't argue that she resigns herself to this reality because this implies that she has the free will to do otherwise.
A simple way to put it is that human life is some kind of elaborate magic trick, and that it is the mystery of this magic trick that makes it worthwhile. Once you remove the mystery and you expose the trick for what it is, it loses its appeal. Life is like that. Believing we have free will and the illusion of choice is what makes life livable. Yet we are to believe that she goes through all of these pre-determined events with the full knowledge of the non-linearity of time and her lack of free will, all the while having the same predisposition of a normal person who can enjoy the trick like it has never been spoiled. You can't have it both ways. The full knowledge of why you will act and the consequences of your actions would logically prevent you to act. -
wesolmon — 9 years ago(February 06, 2017 11:50 PM)
Sidepoint- we don't know she died in pain.
Anyway, i think this is one of those questions the movie asks on a deeper level; If you knew your child was going to die young, would you still have them be born to the world and live their life or would you deny them their life because you know they will die?
I think it would be selfish to not have the child at all. Everyone dies.
I checked wikipedia by "list of polyglots" and there were 71 "he" and only 9 "she" mentioned.