You’re saying she knew exactly when her daughter was going to die, on what mountain etc., and she just said “okay, honey, go have a good time”? I can see why they changed it for the movie. That just doesn’t scan for me. (Nor, for that matter, does fretting over the other stuff like climbing trees, since she’d know that wasn’t going to be the manner of her daughter’s undoing.) At least with a disease, you can take it as impossible to prevent, other than by not having the daughter at all–and that whole “'tis better to have loved and lost” thing does at least make a certain amount of sense.
Yes,
[spoiler] she knew when and where her daughter would die. She knew everything about her own life and her daughter’s, and did nothing to prevent the fall. That is an unacceptable approach for most human beings, I understand - but it is the personally-omniscient heptapod way, and that was the way she was thinking by then.
“Better to have loved and lost…” was just as true for her.[/spoiler]
The short story was superior for so many reasons. Basically every change weakens it. Abbott and Costello? Blame Villeneuve who lives to add Oscar-bait winks at the expense of any cogent direction or well-reasoned art. He’s seen a lot of better movies than his but at least you get to see them referenced.
The expensive house? Icarus dismisses this as a trope, but it seems to have taken people out of the movie, so I gotta ask, “A trope for what, exactly?” Does this bolster the theme, or weaken it? Ironically, in the short story the main character would prefer her financial analyst daughter “pursue something without regard for its monetary rewards.” It’s a major shift and many knew it sacrificed immersion for facile visuals.
Wait…financial analyst daughter you say? Yes, and her dying at 25 was not sad enough for the blockbuster version. I agree Amy Adams is likeable and talented, but the film was still very corny and very manipulative. It’s not even the only nominated film with dead kids, by the way. So sad.
The movie adaptation is all the more egregious since as Shalmanese mentions, “He (Ian/Renner) never really contributes much of note and just feels kind of superfluous.” His contributions towards understanding the aliens through math are erased, because for some reason he needs to be the bad guy, but he does contribute sperm in a relationship that’s a lie from the beginning. Presumably his reproductive choice is satified by “Doesn’t Matter, Had Sex.” How does this serve the theme of us all working together? It annihilates it.
More not-yet- mentioned gripes:
Where did I misplace my satellite phone that direct-dials numbers in China? How do we stop this call from going through? Guns, yeah guns, this movie needs a dramatic standoff.
Nobody mentioning the HazMat suits? They’re an incomprehensibly huge lumbering deal in the first half of the movie, but later when there’s already an alien casualty and it becomes clear we’re at war Louise/Adams emerges all sweaty from the “enemy” vagina ship and everyone just runs up to her with concern and they hug. Beautiful. I suspect the focus on the HazMat suits has some real-life business reason that has nothing to do with telling a story. Somebody influential’s cousin had orange plastic to unload.
Overexplaining stuff kills immersion. It’s explained that in Greek, Hepta means seven, pod means feet. Also, bombs need prominent timer displays. Since we’re changing the story and working the Chinese market, calling the seven-footers Yao Mings could have been funnier. Not sure how that joke translates.
Language doesn’t have this much impact on how we think. Sapir-Whorf is interesting in a Ted Talk way, but not any truer because of it. This is way-exaggerated misinterpretation from the start. I’m sure movie producers pat themselves on the back at all the monumental changes their film-as-a-
language has fomented, and the subtext here is that they’re always to be congratulated for enlightening us, but they should at least be forced to wait 3000 years to market a sequel, since they also made that part up.
So I’m not a complete crank:
This is great. I lol’d when I read this because I thought something close to that in the theater. They kept cutting to that stupid canary and milking the insistent tweets for tension-building. If you’re doing hard sci-fi, learning to speak canary is almost as reasonable and it would have been a real twist! 
It’s probably true that you can’t adequately do hard science fiction, but at least gave it a better try so the suspension of disbelief can outlast Oscar season. (Or at least the 10 months until Blade Runner 2049 comes out. Language will need to invent some kind of German compound word for opening-night-dagger-eyes-masochistic-hate-shame for that one just based on what I’ve seen of the pre-pre-pre-preview hype.)
Otherwise, the message is wasted.
But in the story, she didn’t have
[spoiler]a choice between not having a daughter at all or having one who would inevitably die from a disease. She could have chosen “love” without “lost”!
And I would repeat that it makes no sense to warn her about climbing trees if she knows she is going to die at 25 on a mountain.
I’m just not buying this whole Zen narrative at all.[/spoiler]
To each their own. I thought it worked.
Indeed, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Saw this last night. So far it’s my favorite of the Oscar nominees (haven’t seen Hacksaw Ridge, Moonlight, or the bank robbery flick). It has a lot of premise-overlap with Contact, a movie I detested and wanted my money back from afterwards, but I thorougly enjoyed this. Not the hardest of cold rational hard science but true science fiction nonetheless — the aliens are mortal conscious beings, not God stand-ins; the characters (main and otherwise) apply rational thought to the enigmas and strategic concerns — it isn’t some kind of fucking litmus test about whether or not to “believe”. It’s neither horribly cynical about humans and human nature nor ludicrously optimistic. Some won’t like the main gimmick about time and the mind but like phasers and warp drive or helmets that concentrate thought waves to enable mind over matter etc, it’s not a device a sci-fi audience can’t work with, one major suspension of disbelief and the rest pretty firmly bolted down to things we know are true or which could be.
Good acting and good character development. Could have used more women (one very strong woman character, the main character, and her daughter occasionally, in a sea of menfolk). Viewers can identify with Amy Adams’ character and enjoy the ride; she’s a proficient problem-solver and a good everyday ordinary-person in extraordinary-circumstances type hero.
And the director, Dennis Velleneuve, is now in line for the remake of Dune.
Good luck. Don’t screw this up.
Late to the party, but I saw this the other night and loved it. I particularly enjoyed the use of light in the film. The flashforward scenes are bright and distinct, but many of the scenes with the main characters are very dark, which forces you to focus on dialog and silhouette, and to be a little unsure of your interpretation.
This captures it perfectly.
Science fiction is best (in my opinion) when it captures a small human story within a technologically changing world.
You’re assuming a certain concept of precognition and free will that’s not evident in the text of the film. There’s nothing to indicate that she knows exactly when the decision could be made differently.
I mean, dolphins don’t sit patiently for hours a day trying to communicate with us through a written language that we can photograph and pore over later. Note that the humans never seemed to make any progress with audio communication, although the heptapods are clearly making different noises at times. We’re simply way better at visual pattern matching.
Unfortunately, that particular rabbit hole makes literally everything moot. It’s all predestined, there is no free will… so what’s the point of caring about anything?
Like Contact, the journey is more interesting than the destination, because the destination is ultimately boring.
I’m surprised I didn’t comment on this after I saw it. I loved the film. I had a completely different interpretation for essentially the whole shebang than anyone else has mentioned. For me, the entire point of the film was about overcoming the fear of pain or loss.
It resonated for me on a very personal level. When I was getting married the first time, to a man with significant health issues, a number of people cautioned me about doing that because it meant he would likely die and that would hurt. But when I was contemplating getting married, I already loved him, so it would already hurt. And I would just be choosing to lose him sooner rather than later, and with fewer wonderful moments together.
This struck me as exactly the choice Louise makes in having Hannah. She already loves Hannah. Not having her would already be losing her child, just “sooner” rather than “later,” and with fewer wonderful moments together.
In the whole film, when people respond out of fear, they lose something. When they withstand the fear, they gain something.
I thought it was really wonderful, second only to “Moonlight” for the year, for me.
Just re-read the short story again, and saw even more in it. I recommend it to anyone who watched the movie.
I think the question of whether predestination implies nihilism is an interesting one (and I’d argue that it doesn’t), but it’s not one that the movie is focused on.
It is implied that she does have a choice: She can have a daughter who will die at a young age, or she can choose not to. Knowing that she will face the pain of loss, she chooses to have her daughter anyway. It’s incredibly poignant and bittersweet.
Suggesting she has an additional choice to somehow cheat the hypothetical and have a child that won’t die early is assuming something that’s not a given: that she even has the ability to do so. There’s no reason to believe that she has perfect knowledge of the future. What we see in the movie are individual moments, like dreams of memories from the future. It’s not like there’s a scene where she remembers the moment of conception and looks at a clock so she can later just shift that around.
It’s definitely preferable to the short story in that respect.
Even if she could, she already knows and loves her daughter. People are not interchangeable. One child can’t just be swapped out painlessly for another.
I loved the movie, but hated the cinematography. It was WAY too dark. I hope this isn’t the “stylish” new thing like Shaky-Cam was.
Very distracting.
It was really dark. I thought it worked well for this particular film. Both the contrast with the brightness of the memories, and emphasizing the unknown and the difficulty of interpretation in a movie that’s about the difficulty of understanding others. But I also hope that it doesn’t signify a trend.
Agreed.
That is an excellent point. All the random folks throwing spanners into the works do so because they fear that by doing nothing, they’ll lose something.
Is this a generally applicable lesson for how to live, though? I feel like it’s not.
Depends on the situation though, doesn’t it? The heroine could easily have let things go to pot if she didn’t act instead of sitting passive as well. It’s all about reading (or misreading) the situation, in a plot where (mis)communication is the central driving plot device.