Can someone explain me
-
steven-rick-garcia — 9 years ago(February 08, 2017 05:01 AM)
If we just forget about the movie and think about time as we know it and the butterfly effect as someone previously mentioned.
Louise has a choice:
IF she chooses not to have her daughter, then things would change and the future she had seen would be gone. General Shang never gives Louise his private phone number and Louise never gains his trust with his wife's dying words, thus creating a timeline that could never exist.
With the knowledge of the future, do you choose to change events for selfish reasons and possibly undo past events? Or do you continue on with what you know is "supposed to happen", save humanity, and eventually help out an alien race in 3000 years? -
barttp — 9 years ago(February 10, 2017 02:26 AM)
I guess the concept is that you can SEE the future but you cannot change it. Which makes sense, because if you could change it, it wouldn't be your future anymore.
She just learns to perceive time in a non-linear way, which means that she can see the future the same way we can remember our past. What she sees in the future influences her decision in the present time just like, for everybody else, past events influence present events. But just because you know your past and that past influences your decisions in the present, it doesn't mean that you can change your past right? The same is with the future. The future influences her actions (like the phone call to the Chinese army leader) but it does so in a way, as if it already happened and was a part of the past. It makes full circle.
It's like the first part of The Terminator - Kyle gets sent back to protect Sarah, so that she can give birth to John, but if he hadn't been sent, she wouldn't give birth to John in the first place. They just have the impression that they're making choices, but in fact it's all part of one timeline that already happened and cannot be changed.
So, for me, her choice to have the child even though she knows the child will die, isn't really a choice. She may think it's a choice, but it's always meant to be that way.
Of course it's all just my theory. -
Neuronhead — 9 years ago(February 11, 2017 09:35 PM)
There's a theory that says that all time was created at the big bang. We experience it in one direction only. We don't have the ability to "see" it. We only know this theoretically.
The movie relies on this.
When you look at the past, all the things you did, you did by choice. But they are now fixed in the past. In the same way, even if the future is fixed, you will still use your choice to create that future.
It's not intuitive to know the relationship between fixed time and what we perceive as choice. It seems like a paradox. But it's only our lack of ability to perceive time as a dimension that makes it seem paradoxical.
Language changes how we think. The aliens' language will help us to know how to think this way.
The point of the daughter was to make us, and possibly the mother, think that she was "remembering" the past, until we realise she was remembering the future.
The aliens had given her that ability, which she was then able to use to put in motion the events that would ultimately help the aliens in the future. They needed humanity to work as one, and to understand at a different level than we currently do, which keeps humanity separated and unable to progress to the next level of "enlightenment" (for want of a better word).
I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe -
swords-at-dawn — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 11:04 AM)
I'm thinking the whole Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis reference to language changing the way we perceive the world is important here. If, after learning their language, you can perceive time like the aliens apparently do , then I imagine concepts like "fate", "future", even perhaps "choice" and "accept" become irrelevant - they just evaporate because all is in the "now". Sounds very Zen.