Why are they here?
Why it is hard sci-fi
A linguistics-led first-contact film built around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Twelve heptapod ships arrive simultaneously. The protagonist is a field linguist tasked with building a working translation of the visitors written language. The film follows real fieldwork. Phoneme isolation, response loops, controlled disambiguation, and a written form that is non-linear in time. The military and political pressure is shown as a parallel track to the science, not a substitute for it.
Science inside it
Field linguistics, written-only language acquisition, semasiographic versus glottographic writing, and a strong reading of linguistic relativity in which acquiring the heptapod logograms reorganises the speakers experience of time. The films heptapod B is a genuinely interesting fictional language with a real production design.
Spoiler alert
The flash-forwards in the film are not memories. They are the protagonist experiencing her future after acquiring the heptapod language. Her daughter has not yet been born. The film commits to the relativity claim by treating the experience as real and Banks chooses to have the daughter knowing how it ends.