You cannot change what is meant to happen

It's really rare that a film has a good ending when the set-up and exposition have been completely botched thanks to terribly clumsy writing, but this is the case with Premonition, a film which, about three-fourths of the way through, becomes a totally different movie.

-=- MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD (from here to the end of the review) -=- In the scene where Bullock's character Linda (a soulful performance from Bullock, who's utterly compelling throughout) goes to see a priest about the major confusion she's been experiencing regarding her husband's death and events surrounding it, it becomes clear - or it did to me, anyway - that Linda has indeed been having sight into future events. The film then shifts gears, where she begins dealing with the moral issue of "if you know someone's going to die and you don't stop it from happening, is it the same as killing them?" She then finds herself doing some serious soul searching regarding her relationship with her husband (who is on the verge of having an affair - if it hasn't already started - with a fellow office worker), and the scenes where she realizes she loves him regardless of whether he's been (or is going to be) unfaithful are deeply poignant.

Her loving actions towards him change the husband's mind about meeting said co-worker in a hotel, in fact; he realizes he does love Linda after all. But it is not enough to stop the accident from happening because it was meant to happen that day. The message here is profound and true: you cannot change what is meant to happen. Linda does at least, at the end, understand this, which gives her the peace of knowing she tried to make things right, which allows her to move on with her 2 daughters to the next phase of her life.

This ending is being missed by a lot of people, and I attribute this to the astoundingly convoluted set-up and exposition. How, though, does one successfully convey that a character is having a genuine premonition? In other films, it's been accomplished by the character dreaming it, or flashing on the vision of it during waking hours, but this wouldn't have worked in the film because the set-up and exposition would have been 10 minutes long and the film in its entirety would have run 45 minutes. The writer, I think, was trying to show Linda's state of confusion - and if you've ever had any kind of premonition, you know how confused it makes you because you're not sure at any point that it's a bonafide vision of future events or if you're just projecting fear into something you do not want to happen - but I feel, still, that her mental state during this occurrence could have been conveyed in a more coherent way, so the ending wasn't lost on so many viewers.