I’ll do a quick ARRIVAL reconsideration here.
Save time for philosophy and reflection on means of communication and perception of time.
Add 30 minutes of runtime.
SPOILERS SPOILERS
Keep the flash forwards very brief, College office, pick her up at home, approach to site.
Have more of a collegial team arrangement with task leaders and first assistants from communications, military, CIA, physics, biology… Group discussion and debate with love interest dude just one of group and no reason to think they’ll be together at first.
I thought the reasons to fear the arrivals could have been more developed. More ambiguous creatures that might want a new food source or out to use humanity for own purposes. Protagonist chick shares some of those concerns, not just standard out-of-control militarists.
Physics guy discovers no linear time perception in language. Language chick having very brief flash-forwards and things shift to the nature of time and causality with ‘The Omega Point’ angle.
‘TOP’ is supposed to be an entity that can perceive and effect past, present, and future at once. Many alternate universes are supposed to be dependent upon evolution of intelligent life to create computers that will consume the entire individual universe and evolve into ‘TOP’, the all powerful ultimate computer that can transcend time (and causality) to influence the primitive intelligent creatures (us) in the past to create the tech to create ‘TOP’. This is exactly the sort of “science” one would expect from the Jesuits who gave us The Piltdown Man.
We’ll leave aside uncontrolled input from higher multiverses, causality, quantum uncertainty, The Butterfly effect, and the inability to distinguish a ‘TOP’ critical universe from a simulated game-experiment, together with many more unanswered questions and wild inconsistencies, to return to our story.
I thought the original pace was nice but ultimately got in the way of itself. Everything moves more quickly with slowly building tensions and concerns.
It becomes clear to Physics Dude that the don’t-you-DARE-call-them-Jesuitical, seven-poded hydra-beasts NEED humans to act in certain ways now for the hydras to achieve ultimate time-bending power in the far-future. The great dilemma for the protagonist is whether she should act in those ways, even though it means humans including her own future child will suffer, or attempt to cast-off into an uncertain future. All the while the Chinese coalition is developing some damn good reasons to fear that the hydra-beasts might not be good for humanity.
Of course, we already know the answer for our own universe. We all know that all the incalculable CRUELTIES and AGONIES inflicted by the Satanic Jesuits and their totalitarian minions, together with their deliberately setting up all humanity for The Great Culling caused by The Big Glitch kicked off by a natural disaster or artificial trigger, and every beyond Orwellion agony they will lustily inflict thereafter, is all AAAAAA-OOOOOOOOKKKKKKKKAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!! It doesn’t matter that they could have very easily, and secretly if they wished, spent decades stockpiling necessities for the entire population. We all know its all TOTALLY worth it if the Jesuits can morph themselves into a universal borg-blob to have godlike power. We all know that they will “take care of us” on the back-end because that’s totally what COMPLETELY PSYCHOTIC and PURELY DEPRAVED SATANISTS do. They LOOOOOOOVVVVVVVEEEE us SSSSSSOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!
Anyhoo, chick and dude have good reasons for suspecting it could possibly be best to trust the hydra-beasts. They stop the Chinese and TOGETHER make the COSMICALLY IMMENSE decision to act-out chick’s future glimpses.