@FilmFan1983 said:

I totally agree with the voiceover guy. The part with the Chinese guy at the end doesn't make sense. Amy Adams acts surprised to hear from him, even though she should have already known.

There may be several legitimate reasons why Louise (Amy Adams) acted surprised.

1. It's been 18 months since her job as an "alien intermediary" in Montana. So many things have passed in those 18 months: she catalogued the whole alien language, she wrote a successful book about it, gave lectures across the country, probably met several important people etc. (It's not clear to me if she also got pregnant and gave birth to Hannah in that timespan.) Her life got into a "maelstrom" of events. So at that day when she would encounter the same Chinese general in person, the memory of her days in Montana may have consisted of mostly the things that had made the biggest impression on her (such as meeting the alien beings, working with Ian on the interpretation of the logograms), and as such the momentary event of her calling a Chinese general over the phone may have been reduced in her memory to merely a footnote that she had almost forgotten about.

2. Louise had a flashforward memory of meeting the Chinese general at "some conference"; she didn't necessarily presume/realize in advance that it was going to be this conference.

3. It may have been the first time when she experiences that reality is catching up with her flash-forward memories. So even though she understands in theory what the concept of flash-forward memories (or: seeing the future) means, it still doesn't equal the experience of being confronted with it in person; hence she may be caught by surprise by the surreality of it. (Consider this: we've all seen the Eiffel Tower on pictures and in movies; and we may also have read all the technical details about it, such as its height and when it was built. But all that intellectual knowledge can't replace the experience of visiting Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time with your own eyes.)

4. Possibly she met and spoke to so many important people and international leaders in the past 18 months that she doesn't realize that this Chinese general is the same general to whom she spoke on the phone in Montana (as opposed to, say, some American/Russian/Australian general of Asian descent whom she met at some banquet with a Prime Minister; or some Chinese official/representative whom she had contacted by phone during the last year while overseeing the worldwide translation of her book). So when meeting the Chinese general, she may have been somewhat confused and thought to herself: "Wait, who were you again?" before the penny dropped.

5. In Montana, when "recalling" the (forward) memory of meeting the Chinese general, she was in a state of emergency, in a last ditch effort to diffuse a potential war situation by making a phone call to him. So naturally she was focusing solely on the relevant information that she needed at that moment, namely his personal phone number and the exact Chinese words that she needs to tell him to persuade him over the phone. All other things were secondary at that moment. So when months later she meets him for real, she may be surprised by the Chinese general's actual personality, which was different from her so-far established opinion of him that was based mostly on how he was depicted by the (American) media. In other words, she simply didn't immediately recognize him as being that same Chinese general.

I hope that helps.

[@yurenchu

Thanks for the detailed response. A lot of these points make sense, and make me believe that her playing the scene like that was a choice rather than an accident. I feel that the film supports accepting determinism as being for the greater good, but I always felt it promoted less individual responsibility. However, that's my own bias. Someone else may view this film as having a positive or uplifting message. Although your interpretations make sense, I'd rather it support the alternate theory that Louise can still imagine different possibilities.

@FilmFan1983 said:

[@yurenchu

Thanks for the detailed response. A lot of these points make sense, and make me believe that her playing the scene like that was a choice rather than an accident. I feel that the film supports accepting determinism as being for the greater good, but I always felt it promoted less individual responsibility. However, that's my own bias. Someone else may view this film as having a positive or uplifting message. Although your interpretations make sense, I'd rather it support the alternate theory that Louise can still imagine different possibilities.

Thanks for your reply. I think that the points in my previous post in this thread are not inherently incompatible with the alternate scenarios/interpretations of "more individual responsibility" and "Louise imagining different possibilities". When you wrote "accepting determinism", I assume that you're mainly referring to the fact that Louise let the pregnancy & birth of Hannah happen, even though she knew in advance that Hannah would eventually die at a young age? One could argue that Louise had made the decision to have a daughter long before she got pregnant, namely at the time that she got the first "flashforward memories" of Hannah, and that these flashforward memories were actually the result of Louise opting (albeit quite subconsciously) for a future with a daughter (rather than without). (Or in other words: if Louise hadn't subconsciously decided to want to have a child in order to break the monotony of her dull everyday life, then she possibly wouldn't have had flashforward memories of Hannah in the first place.)

And in reference to the phone call to the Chinese general, it could be argued that Louise took active initiative to remedy a sticky situation and hence "willed" a causality loop in existence, which would allow her to save the world from going to war, rather than wait it out passively and let her military superiors resolve the crisis. More concretely, Louise used her alien gift in order to find a stable (yet seemingly paradoxical) timeline (out of all possible timelines in her personal potential "future-space") in which the world's nations wouldn't go to war, and by her "authority-defying" (and determinism-defying) act of contacting a foreign general using a stolen phone she single-handedly steered history into that direction. It must have been a tough and challenging deed (after leading a life of mostly compliance and doing as she's told by others), and she was improvising because she hadn't used her gift before (at least not to this extent), but she rose to the occasion and managed to pull if off. If that's not "promoting individual responsibility", then I don't know what is.