I feel like the linguist interviewed may have missed the point of the semasiograms (explicitly not called logograms in the movie). Which I suppose is understandable, as the movie by itself may have not done a sufficiently good job of explaining why they are not like Chinese logograms after all. (I am unfortunately biased by having also read _The Story of Your Life before hand).
Logograms, although they do not encode the phonological structure of words in a language, nevertheless do correspond to words, and written sentences using logograms mirror the linear syntactic structure of the spoken language. The distinction between Heptapod A and Heptapod B is not merely a matter of discarding phonological representation and using logograms; Heptapod B is intended to have literally no relation whatsoever to the structure of Heptapod A, being a fully 2-dimensional semasiographic system while Heptapod A is a (necessarily, because spoken) linear system.
And while the circular semasiograms developed for the movie certainly look cool, and were probably a good choice for the film-makers to make, they really do not do justice to what's described in the original story, or to the actual real-world 2D writing systems that have been developed (e.g., UNLWS: http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/grammar.pdf).
Logograms, although they do not encode the phonological structure of words in a language, nevertheless do correspond to words, and written sentences using logograms mirror the linear syntactic structure of the spoken language. The distinction between Heptapod A and Heptapod B is not merely a matter of discarding phonological representation and using logograms; Heptapod B is intended to have literally no relation whatsoever to the structure of Heptapod A, being a fully 2-dimensional semasiographic system while Heptapod A is a (necessarily, because spoken) linear system.
And while the circular semasiograms developed for the movie certainly look cool, and were probably a good choice for the film-makers to make, they really do not do justice to what's described in the original story, or to the actual real-world 2D writing systems that have been developed (e.g., UNLWS: http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/grammar.pdf).