system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Arrival] does the heptapod language imply that there is no such thing as free will?

Throughout Arrival we are sprinkled with scenes that seem to imply that Dr. Banks had a child who eventually got sick and dies, only for it to be a twist that it’s actually her future. With Banks learning the heptapod language and thus learning a different view on time, Arrival concludes with her accepting that it’s her future and she is destined to have a child with Donnelly only for their relationship to end and their child passing. Does this mean that there is no free will? If you’re dealt a crappy hand in life and will always have that child that will eventually lead to grief, there’s no changing that future? Is there no changing the past? Can she diagnose the disease sooner, or even just decide not to have that child?

To a lesser degree, we see it with the reasoning of the heptapod’s visit. They came to us because in the future they’ll need us. Will that always be the outcome?
gpt
When you're in a forest, you can only see a little way in the path ahead or behind. You can tell by the grade of the path whether you're going up or down, and if you pay attention you can tell whether you've been climbing or descending, whether the path has been turning this way or that. You build up a little map in your mind of where you are...

And sometimes you come to a clearing in the forest, and you see a familiar mountain or overlook, and you get a better idea of where you've been and where you're going. You aren't there yet, but you have to get out of the forest, and if you stay on this path you will.

A glimpse of the future is not predestination in the classic sense of being opposite to free will, the whole "time is a flat circle" statement where everything has already/will already have happened, and we're just experiencing the events in linear sequence. It's a statement of probablities, usually as interpreted by a very limited sensorium. Banks gets glimpses of the possible future, where the path ahead would lead. She could do something different; but that would mean leaving her path - and it is very difficult for people to change. There's a lot of inertia there. She probably isn't going to go off and have a one night stand to get pregnant with someone else, or stab herself in the throat so that she never gets pregnant. So as the range of things she *won't* do narrows, the future probabilities coalesce...and that's what she saw. The what-might-yet-be's.