I enjoyed this film when I saw it way back.., but this one quote stuck in my mind/craw, even after all these years:
Prot: I wanna tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
This seems like a subjective understanding. Impossible to verify one way or another, even for K-PAXians one should think given that to prove the theory, one would have to carry data from one universe, through a big bang, and into the next. As the C's once responded when asked what 7th Density was like (paraphrasing);
"We're only 6th Density. We don't know!".
But something in me rebels against the idea as being in the same class as linear time models and monotheism.
The concept of Free Will has been smashed back and forth like a squash ball around university philosophy departments for decades, and this particular version of it is a popular notion which has found its way into "Enlightened" films before, that the universe is a ticking clockwork with no variation which does nothing but wind up and wind down. There was another effects-heavy and thought-provoking film called, "Mr. Nobody" which turned heavily on this point.
Despite its many excellent qualities, I found it similarly distasteful in this respect, vibrating with a hint of nihilism, an excuse for dark side types looking for reasons to not participate.
I don't buy it, and not just because I don't
want to buy it, but because it lacks intuitive sense. Why bother with soul evolution, or lessons at all if everything, if God is just a wind-up toy running on automatic?
But perhaps I am just falling into the same trap some Christians find themselves in when faced with ideas about evolution.