4. Story vs film

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There are some striking differences and choices that the film makes in contrast to the story. There is the whole international military standoff for one thing, but also the much more overt time travel theme, the reason for the daughter's death and a whole heap of other apparently minor changes. Do you feel these choices were appropriate for the two different media? Or were you disappointed in one or more of these choices?

Comments

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    As posted in Q1, I thought the film didn't really do the story justice. In particular the daughter's death undermined the whole point of it I thought - in the story it's (at least potentially) preventable - making her decision to still follow the course of her life stronger, and more interesting.

    The international standoff thing was a heap of balls too, but I can see how it made for a satisfying climax to the plot before the twist ending, so I can forgive it.

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    The international stand-off was probably necessary to ground to film and make it accessible. I think that if the film had stuck strictly to the story, it would have been too esoteric - maybe straying too far into 2001 Space Odyssey territory. Because films cost so much more to make than novels or short stories, their producers are much less likely to take those kind of chances.

    I also think the 'international cooperation' angle was a pet project of the director, and likely a reactions to Trump's 'America First' stance. Note, however, that it's still always the Russians and Chinese who are the bad apples. So you know which audience the film had in mind.

    For my part, I thought the death of the daughter made the story more compelling. I read the daughter as dying in the short story, and this was later confirmed to me when watching the film afterward.

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    I preferred the story all the way. I agreed with some of those changes for the film version, but many of them left me puzzled. Why change the way the child died? The whole military standoff thing never worked for me. I thought that a bad decision.

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    I thought a lot about possible reasons for the change of daughter's cause of death, and the only thing I could think of was that it heightened the conflict of choice and also gave a motive for the father leaving. Specifically, if she died in a climbing accident then one could always cling to the possibility that maybe just maybe in another version of history the accident did not happen. But if a congenital illness then there's no chance, and I can imagine the father being horrified that despite knowing what the mother did she went ahead anyway.

    Thinking about it now, as well as cause of death, the age at death was also different. In the story the daughter is an adult who has graduated and in early career (mid 20s, I think?), and quite likely having adult relationships of her own. In the film, she never gets beyond childhood.

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    Btw, the film was shot in Quebec. The house on the lake is located on the Lake of Two Mountains close to where I grew up. The university scenes at the beginning are at the Universite de Montreal. The gala scenes with the Chinese general are at the Place des Arts in Montreal, and the valley where the roadblock and tents/alien ship were located is on the south shore of the St Lawrence estuary near Rimouski.
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    @Apocryphal said:
    Btw, the film was shot in Quebec. The house on the lake is located on the Lake of Two Mountains close to where I grew up. The university scenes at the beginning are at the Universite de Montreal. The gala scenes with the Chinese general are at the Place des Arts in Montreal, and the valley where the roadblock and tents/alien ship were located is on the south shore of the St Lawrence estuary near Rimouski.

    How very cool!

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    @BurnAfterRunning said:
    As posted in Q1, I thought the film didn't really do the story justice. In particular the daughter's death undermined the whole point of it I thought - in the story it's (at least potentially) preventable - making her decision to still follow the course of her life stronger, and more interesting.

    I hadn't made that connection, so thanks for raising it. There's a strong theme of free will in the story, and whether it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

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    I saw the film when it first came out, and even with a few years’ distance it overwhelmed my sense of discovery of the story as a story.

    What the story did was to prompt me to think a lot about phenomenology - phenomenology of language, of time, of agency, all of which are standard fare for me. But I began dreaming about a phenomenology of Fermat’s principle, which is not my standard fare. I found a dense article that proposed just such a thing. I haven’t dug into it yet, but it’s in my queue.

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    There seems to have been a lot of thought about Fermat's principle over the years, along the lines of "does this mean that light is somehow sentient and aware" though a lot of it comes down to it seeming to be an inevitable consequence of a wavelike description of light rather than particulate. So if you think in terms of photons whizzing about the philosophical difficulty can arise, but if you think in terms of wave propagation it doesn't. Which would put it nicely in the same camp as the several interpretations of quantum mechanics and field theory.

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    That prompts the question of whether all waves refract at the precise angle that makes for the fastest route. I’m a ham radio operator and know a little bit of practical wave theory, but Fermat is not something that makes any difference in that context.

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