1. It's not a book. It's just a short story. It's only 16pp long or something.
2. The central point of the story is: brilliant linguist learns to write an alien script and it teaches her to see the future. That is the core plot in a sentence. The film loses that.
Don't get me wrong: I liked the film, as a modern SF film: i.e., brain damaged into mindlessness, but still quite pretty.
It's like a version of Hamlet in which he lives happy ever after, though. It is missing the point in the most profound possible way.
It's funny though, I do feel a bit the same way about Dune. It's a Cliffs Notes of the book, and doesn't add anything new and thought provoking. Mindless but beautiful.
Still, I wouldn't say it missed the point. Just that it wasn't really necessary.
Anyway, free to disagree.
I did say:
>> Don't get me wrong: I liked the film, as a modern SF film
I agree about Dune. If you know the book, it's a very pretty retelling. If you don't, it's a sort of weird summary with no signs of why so many people love it so much.
And yet, when I think about Dune 2021, I feel like it lacks a lot of interesting context and explanation from the novel. But I know plenty of people who didn't read it and loved the film. I suspect DV takes more care to lay out the important details than I'm able to perceive knowing the book.
It's a 16pp short story. Read it, then reply. It takes about 15min if you're a slow reader!
Watched Arrival then read it, and loved the movie.
Read Dune and then watched it. Underwhelmed by the film.
In order to learn to write the aliens' script, the interpreter must learn what Douglas Adams called "defocussed temporal perception". To write the language you need to be able to see into the future. Learning the script teaches her to do this.
Seeing into the future she watches her own daughter die and there's nothing she can do to stop it.
The scriptwriters didn't understand any of this so they made the aliens spray-paint stencils on glass and inserted a terrible irrelevant subplot about stopping a war.