Only one film's ever made me actually think after I've seen it, and that film is Arrival, by Denis Villeneuve.

Sidenote

Sidenote: film reviewers describe films as "thought-provoking" all the time, and it worries me - apart from this one film, in my entire life, films have never ever ever provoked a thought from me. Never. Either they actually do, and I can never remember it (unlikely), reviewers are lying/exaggerating (even more unlikely), or I'm really different from everybody else that watches films.

Is everyone else actually thinking about films after they watch them, or does a film just go in one ear and out the other, like it does for me?

Related to that, do filmmakers want their films to be thought-provoking - do they want you to think specific things or in a specific way after you've seen what they've made? Cos that kinda sounds a bit like politics then. I don't want to call it "propaganda", but it's definitely not pure entertainment anymore.

The film

MAJOR SPOILER OF A SINGLE PLOT POINT AHEAD.

So, in the film, at the start, you see Amy Acker's character's (Louise) teenage daughter (Hannah) dying from some illness (I'm gonna say cancer, it's easier), and throughout the film, it works back through Hannah's life, to when she was a young girl. Eventually, you learn that Louise knew she was going to die from that illness, even before she was conceived! (the reason why's not important here, and telling you would just spoil it more)

For ages afterward (I think, if I'm not misremembering something that didn't actually happen), I couldn't figure out why - why would Louise intentionally have a child, knowing that she would die slowly and painfully when she was still really young? It made no sense!

After a while, I realised (one possible reason) why. Maybe I just had to read James Lindsay's stupidly good book "Life in Light of Death".

It happens to us all in the end. Whether or not Hannah got cancer and died at 14, she would 100% die sometime anyway. No matter how good or bad a person you are, no matter how amazing your life was or wasn't, you die. You know deep down, when you have a child, that child will die. You might not think about it, you might accidentally think about it and immediately banish the thought from your mind, but it will happen. If you're lucky (and selfish), you will die before your child, so you won't have to go through the pain of losing them. It's inevitable.

Sure, she could've chosen not to conceive. Then Hannah wouldn't die, but she wouldn't have existed, wouldn't have been born, and wouldn't have been able to life out those 14 or so happy years of her life with her Mum and Dad, either. So, to avoid the inevitable death, you don't have a child, or you say "my child will live a happy, fulfilled life with me, for as long as possible, and then one of us will die".

So, when you have a child, you know either they or you will die, and YOU DO IT ANYWAY, because it's worth it! Is that not something to celebrate, the joy a child brings in the world, or am I being far too optimistic?

And it's not just children, it's load of different things - friends, relationships, etc. When you start dating someone, either you break up before you get married, you're one of the 42% of marriages that ends in divorce ([relatively] 30% lower than the peak in 2003), or you die.

And yet