spoilers ahead I felt like the character conflict arcs were contrived and ultimately the idea of learning a language makes you a pre-cog fell flat for me. In science fiction, the big idea goes ‘woo!’ or the characters go ‘woo!’ but in the case of Arrival, nothing really went ‘woo!’
But maybe I’m wrong - what was I missing about Arrival?
I’d suggest reading the original short story, Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang. It makes the underlying premise much clearer.
Learning the heptapod language doesn’t make you precognitive. It unlocks time as a dimension, allowing you to navigate forward and backward through time the same way you do through space. It causes you to “remember” things that you will experience in the future and apply those memories to your present experience. You start experiencing all of time at once, instead of in a regimented sequence.
The overall effect is the realization that the arrow of time is an illusion, with questions about what that means for free will, fate, predestination.
The movie itself is good, but it’s a great adaptation of the source material, which is incredibly difficult to translate to film. Just the way it starts by fooling you into thinking the main character is at a later stage of her own life than she really is while later revealing what she’s actually experiencing was really handled well in the script.
I thought that the reveal of the heptapods being much larger creatures, and our earlier understanding of them to be based on the characters limited perception, to be a really neet allusion to the overall premise of the story as well.