Please forgive me for probably asking this for the hundredth time.
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uncleroger — 9 years ago(November 16, 2016 04:04 PM)
Knowing the language doesn't give you complete and instantaneous knowledge of the future. You just get glimpses of some things to come, not all of them.
So it's very possible that Louise knew about her daughter but didn't know that Ian would have taken it so badly.
I think that Ian left both because he realised he was sort of kept in the dark and because he was probably of the idea that no existence at all is better than a short existence with a painful and early demise. -
creatorof2002 — 9 years ago(November 16, 2016 09:50 PM)
The whole time I thought the tragedy of her daughter's death was in her past but it had not happened yet? Strange. When her mother called to ask how she was doing and she said she was doing fine I thought it was a sympathy call due to the loss of her daughter.
I would like to believe that the possible futures in this story are malleable and not written in stone like that ancient greek story about how you cannot change your fate even if you know what it is.
I would like to believe he stayed by his wife and daughter through it all like a good husband and father. -
kobrakai1 — 9 years ago(November 17, 2016 01:39 PM)
Louise was the only one that directly intetacted with the aliens so I took it as she was more influenced by their language than anyone else.
Maybe no one else was able to be aware of their own future which is why Ian didn't know about Hannah but Louise did. -
jervistetch — 9 years ago(November 17, 2016 05:59 PM)
She probably WAS the foremost authority on the language since she wrote the book (bible?) on it. But General Shang seemed to know the secrets of the language at the point in time of that ceremony. That's how he knew to whisper in her ear. Maybe the ceremony takes place after the time that Ian has left her and her daughter has passed. Not quite sure.
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transmentalist — 9 years ago(November 17, 2016 10:47 PM)
Maybe the ceremony takes place after the time that Ian has left her and her daughter has passed.
The ceremony appeared to take place a year or two at most after the incident
But, in the movie's final revelation, everything is "the past" to Louise and, probably, General Shang as well
Meaning, once you've mastered the aliens' language sufficiently, like them you will experience all time as "past"
There's still a lot of confusion about this.
I like to imagine Louise has become like a character in a book who understands that she is, in fact, in a book AND knows the entire book. She can't change anything, because it's all written. All her life's experience, including and especially her daughter's life & death, are already written.
I haven't read Vonnegut's "Timequake" but I believe it covered a similar theme. So did "Slaughterhouse Five" now that I think of it. Maybe Vonnegut was onto something. -
Insomniatic102 — 9 years ago(November 20, 2016 01:51 AM)
Well she is pretty much the world's greatest linguist. She's going to have a big head start on the language than everyone else, including him. Maybe she told him before he learned enough to see it himself, to make it easier? I dunno. It's probably much harder than we think. Not like learning Chinese, which many people just can't do, at least not without years.
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Rhythm_Rider — 9 years ago(November 20, 2016 06:26 AM)
Agreed that Ian's knowledge of the language was never going to be as sophisticated as Louise's, however he does make that big discovery (towards the end) implying that his understanding was greater than we initially thought.
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RookDragonwolf — 9 years ago(November 20, 2016 06:09 PM)
My question is, since she now knows the future that Ian and her would be together, that they would have a daughter who would die of a tragic disease, does she tell him all this before they start their relationship? He definitely deserves to know. And he has a right to make a choice to rather continue or not. It's not her decision alone to decide to continue knowing what would happen.
I wonder how this all plays out in the book. Has anyone read the book? How did that end? -
LinkinSixEcho — 9 years ago(November 21, 2016 08:43 PM)
I think the aliens did give Ian the tools he needed to decode their language in a way that was understandable to him.
After Louise's comprehension and increasing sophistication at written language, they presented Ian with the same informationtime travelin mathematical form, which he solved ("it's .08333!") when Louise was taking a snoozer.
He just didn't get a chance to go any further since he was shoved out the pod andetc.
I also agree he was a pretty nice guyso why would he give his terminal daughter a broken home? Obviously he was pissed Louise hadn't consulted him on making a cancer baby, so maybe he felt her secret decision was
so
selfish as to be actually quite coldly calculating? Perhaps at her revelation he was staring into the eyes of a desperate woman who only needed his sperm to fill a void, that any love they shared was a sham.
Just a theory. -
StrangerTheHorse — 9 years ago(November 22, 2016 06:58 AM)
Granted, his character is not super well fleshed out, but I don't feel he would abandon both of them. He seemed like a genuinely good man.
"Only a man who's been burned knows what hell is truly like."
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LinkinSixEcho — 9 years ago(November 22, 2016 12:48 PM)
Not in the Dr. Who sense, no there's no time travel.
But who's to say the ability to perceive various points in a person's future isn't a kind of travel of consciousness? As Louise is "remembering" (flash-forwarding) her encounter with the Chinese general, her body (and brain) does not physically move from the spot where she's sitting; her mind does, however, wander.
Recollection, or recalling an event to memory, is basically reconstructing a scene from the various thought bits stored at the time of the event. In order for Louise to have recalled a memory from her future, it might be argued those infinitesimal bits that make up the future recollection are actually time traveling
from
the future to her present brain.
So on a microcosmic scale, it could be argued there is an element of time travel. -
doorclosed321 — 9 years ago(November 22, 2016 01:48 PM)
Untrue. When she meets the general she is not remembering anything, she is experiancing both points simultaneously, fully living breathing them. She is experiancing 2 point in her existance together. You are right her body doesn't move, that would be time travel.
In the book explains she can conciously experiance her entire existence simultaneously, but from the human perspective she can't doit for a long "time" and it requires great effort.
The only thing she remebered she did in those two scenes is where in her life that general gave that number, everything else was her living her life in 2 places at once. She wasn't time traveling, she was accessing her infinite self. She can't go back "in time" and meet dinosaurs for instance, that would be time travel. Two very different things