Absolutely; all my expressed opinions are my own.

I loved the movie Arrival and can't agree it is soulless. Don't get so focused on what it lacks from the short story that you don't see what it does have that the short story does not.

I haven't read the original text, I just couldn't find anything interesting about it. I understand that there is a plot twist which I should've become interested in, and apparently some of the characters are supposed to have some kind of emotional depth, but it just totally missed me.

I really like the movie, but i think it did lose some of the soul of the short story.

The short story is essentially a story about grief using time travel as a metaphor but not actually having time travel in it. The movie has the character changing the past in a critical moment which kind of undermines the whole soul of the story imo.

To be clear, i still think arrival is a great movie, just rather different from the source material in terms of meaning and "soul"

There's no actual time travel or changing the past in Arrival.

The phone call scene with the general is heavily implied to rely on prescient knowledge of the future