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Comment by tomlock | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the suggestion is that she can change the future in the movie.

My interpretation of the phone call is that it demonstrates the reverse causality that is now possible thanks to her new understanding. It doesn't mean the cause nor the effect are mutable, just that they are now accessible in a different order than is typical.

I think in the movie the decision to have the child is also immutable. So when in the final scene she commits to that path - it is because of the paradoxical freedom born of fatalism that she manages to be cheerful. There is literally no other way things could go - so why worry?

If she's selfish - she's deterministically, immutably selfish. Under the new model - the concept of a "change" to the future through action is incomprehensible. The future just "is".

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According to the screenwriter, they hedged a bit on the question of free will in the movie compared to the book. He specifically addresses this here: https://youtu.be/xzEPU2PTjT4?t=23m55s

She can act on the knowledge of the future. She could have decided not to have the child right? The same as she decided to act to stop the Chinese. It's very inconsistent to argue she had to have the child and that he couldn't have told her husband earlier, since she eventually told him. In the book that's impossible, the present is not affected by the knowledge of the future. Things go along exactly in the same way, it's just that she perceives the future the same way as she perceives the past. It's difficult to understand because we are use to thinking we have free will. The book takes away that and makes us face the strangeness of this hypothetical reality. In the movie it's just inconsistent in my opinion.

> She could have decided not to have the child right?

There is nothing in the movie that explicitly supports this.

(Spoilers ahead.) My take is that as she learns the language, her mind is changed. Not only can she remember the future, she comes to understand that she cannot change it. Just like the other heptapod knew it was going to die, but came to Earth anyway because the future is immutable.

Giving her free will introduces a paradox: the future which she remembers will no longer exist if she veers off the path. Unless she can see all possible futures, which is a different story to Arrival altogether (see Dune). The whole visit could be pointless in any case (again, spoilers) if Earth decides not to help the heptapods in the far future. The entire plot hinges on an immutable future.

She comes to understand she cannot change it, yet from her point of view, she decides to call the Chinese. And she chooses, from her point of view, when she tells her husband. She does actions that would have been impossible without knowledge of the future. Maintaining that she didn't have free will when her actions depend on that knowledge is very difficult in my opinion. You have the subjective impression of free will, if you have certain knowledge and you can sometimes act on it, why not always? The book fixes this making it irrelevant to have that knowledge. The movie crosses the line when some causality is reversed.

It's possible that she decided to have the child knowing what would happen to her, and that's why she can see that future, but that's still her making her own selfish decision. If she wouldn't have done that, then she wouldn't "remember" having a child. I think this is why they changed how the child dies from the book. In the book she dies in a perfectly preventable accident. In the movies is kind of pre-arranged. Making her die in an accident that the mother know is going to happen would have been very obviously evil when it's been proven she can sometimes act on knowledge of the future. The book makes the situation maximize the fatalism of the character: she knows her daughter is going to die in that climbing trip, yet she can't do anything to avoid it, she's just an observer, a passenger in her own life.

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