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?
It’s not about perception changing reality it’s the other way around. The movie is a meditation on the Sapir Worf hypothesis, that the structure of language literary changes how you perceive the world.