Two main things: this is probably the best movie about contact with aliens, but it is, by tradition, very far from the original book. The plus for me outweighed the minus, and yet the film could not be on 8, but on all 10, if the authors preserved and conveyed the most important intrigue and emotion of the story itself (I will return to this at the end). But we must give them credit – they filmed a good story, invested not only money, but also soul in it: rarely in fiction you can see such a stunning performance of actors, felt up to the trembling of hands, there is rarely such an atmosphere, depth, elaboration of every detail. The film is very believable and psychological, and if there are any holes in it, I didn’t see them, although finding holes and smashing for them is one of my favorite hobbies. Amazingly beautifully shot, played.
And now back to the story. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend Ted Chan’s The Story of Your Life, which will be quite interesting after the film, as it has little to do with it. Or if you don't want to read, I'll tell you what the filmmakers didn't do.
Alert, spoiler next, I warned you.
There is no threat of war, no action, no panic of humanity. It has much more linguistics and less military. The whole story is built by alternating scenes: here the heroine establishes communication with the heptapods, but she remembers moments in the life of her daughter, who has already died. And this is, you know, grief ... real. The loss with which a woman lives, and goes deep into the work, not to think about it. Working with aliens, she learns not even to see the future, but she sees the entire timeline at once, it does not matter what period you are now, for her everything exists at the same time. And only on the very last lines of the story it says that all these memories, all this pain, all the moments of the biography lived were not in the past, and this daughter has yet to be born! And it's shocking, it's a revelation that strikes like lightning. Filmmakers CANNOT convey this effect, they replaced grief with vague premonitions of a thriller nature, so you see how her abilities are born and visions come, and it is immediately clear that this is the future. They did not convey the very effect for which the story was written, did not preserve the intrigue until the very end. But I admit that even without that, it made a good movie. He's just different.
In the Russian localization there is a mistake: subtitles Alien says about his partner that Abbott is dying. Abbott who? So, in the original they have some names, and in our version – completely different, but in the moment with the subtitles they forgot about it.
