I read the short story a while back, and saw the movie today. Obviously the screenplay differs on some points, and they shoehorned some geopolitical tension in there, that if I recall correctly wasn't in the story - and I didn't care for it. But my biggest problem with the film was, it doesn't "show you" what the source material did so well: the mechanic, the hard sf device, how the alien "language" really worked, how it connected to the memories of Amy Adams' character. Mid film they threw in a voice-over - I think it's Renner - that's completely out of place, that tries to explain with a clunky metaphor what these logograms actually do - I'm trying to write this spoiler free - so I won't go into this in detail. It just seems like they were at loss to really show what was going on. On the other hand they forcefully explain every human action: like why the marriage breaks down - so you have a very neat plot - again trying to keep this spoiler free. The source material differs here as well: simply because in real life relationships break down; doesn't need explaining. But what needed explaining, they couldn't.

The logograms btw are striking - I really loved those inkblot effects and all the visuals and prints the vfx people designed around them. And the aliens themselves were also very beautiful - the minimalism works very well; although why aliens would always have low-fi organic looking stuff and no slick devices running on quantum cpu's or something beats me.

This movie can't compete with Interstellar. Anyone who says so ignores the fact that Nolan is a supreme story teller. He didn't need to turn to boring exposition in a voice over to explain, for example, something so mind boggling as relative time on that planet where an hour or less was equal to x-amount of years in orbit outside the influence of that collapsed star or the gravity of the planet, or whatever it was. He used dialogue and that's what Villeneuve should've done - based on the source material they easily could've written some interesting dialogues.

I'm a big sf fan and I'm glad there is a lot of sf coming to cinema's in the upcoming months. But this was at times borderline boring. And I don't know if people will get that wow moment the short story offered. I really think a lot of people who don't know the source material might struggle understanding the plot.

Amy Adams is very good in this. Renner is under utilized. I hope maybe there is longer cut of this coming to bluray in the near future.