MovieChat Forums > Arrival (2016) Discussion > Does she alter her future? (Spoilers)

Does she alter her future? (Spoilers)

posted 8 years ago by tropicknight
3 replies | jump to latest

At the end Amy Adams says (to Jeremy Renner) something along the lines of "if you saw your whole life ahead of you, would you change anything?"

We know that she told her husband (who we know is Renner) the news about their daughter's illness and he left them both. But then she says the aforementioned line, which makes me think that she alters her future by not telling Renner about the imminent illness, and they live happily together; that is, until the daughter's death. That's why we see Renner with both Amy Adams and their daughter in the bed at the end. That's the way I read it: That she altered her future by not telling him about the illness and they lived happily as a family.

My friend said he thinks she just lived it out normally and didn't tell him, but that line I mentioned above, and the fact that we see Renner with them at the end of the movie, made me think she altered her own future a bit.

What do you think?

[–] DeceasedTerminator 8 years ago

I got the impression she didn't change anything. She says something to the effect of "Even though I know how it all ends, I'll cherish every moment of it." As to the happy family scene, the daughter looked like she was about 5 or 6 when Renner left in the future glimpses. I'm pretty sure that scene was before he left.

[–] lightningcows 8 years ago

hmm, i don't think she altered her future all that much. The sense that I got was that she would have to tell him of the illness eventually and the outcome would have more or the less the same. I should mention that the flash-forwards are just brief snapshot views into the future. There isn't a reason to believe that, in the film, that they didn't remain a close family until the her husband's death (a brief reference in a dialog in a flashforward, if I remember right) and her daughter's cancer.

[–] emvan 8 years ago

The point is that the future cannot be altered because it already exists and has always existed.* Her question is not about whether one would change the future if possible, but about whether you can live with the knowledge that it cannot be changed.

*It does help to know that this is so, according to special relativity, specifically, because (if SR is ultimately true, which is seriously in question) we live in what's called a Minkowski block universe. The rarely-used technical term is "chronogeometric fatalism."

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.