Yeah, my #1 problem with Arrival was that it completely sidestepped basically the entire point of the short story - free will doesn't exist and how the characters come to grips with that (or don't) as they start thinking as the aliens do.

You're talking about "Arrival", not "The Arrival", which is a 1996 movie staring Charlie Sheen about an alien invasion.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115571/

Strangely enough the Charlie Sheen "The Arrival" is also a really good physics movie. I've yet to see a movie do the SETI/Astronomy/physics stuff better :-).

I love him building a radio telescope control in his attic, using local people's roof satellite dishes as the array !

The scene with the mountains and the cloud was really cool. After that, there was some build up but kind of just went nowhere. "Here's some circles, now you can hallucinate the future" was overall a pretty underwhelming drift into fantasy.