Rather good but overloaded with unnecessary stuff

Rating: 7/10 (15 April 2018)

This was an ok movie. There's lots of very negative reviews giving this 1-2 stars, don't believe those, it's not horrible. It just has some issues that heavily decrease the amount of enjoyment you can get from this.

I'll focus only on bad parts. But it has good stuff as well.

1. It's overloaded with unnecessary scenes that add nothing. 50% of Portman scenes feel tonally different from everything else. These are mostly flashbacks about a hard woman's life with a husband missing. These just don't fit the context of the movie overall.

2. The movie tries to be Science Fiction but in fact it's totally divorced from reality and any particular science. They didn't want to overcomplicate things, but even past that, it is full of outright dumb stuff (scientists carrying automatic weapons, wearing no protective gear, no military in the group, using water transport after encountering a hostile reptilia etc.)

3. The ending is ambiguous, but not in a good way. It's not open edned, it's just shot in a way that makes it unclear what happened. Some people compare this to original Solaris and Stalker yet these feel much more complete. It never gives you enough stuff to actually think about.

4. Tone and pacing. It's very different tonally, feels like it doesn't know what it is trying to be. Starts very slow (like good movies do), but the slow is caused mostly by unnecessary scenes that add nothing and are mostly pretentious. Like the movie is trying to act smart but fails. It gets sort of good by the end reveal, but then falls flat again with an ending that fails to provoke an interesting thought.

5. The look. Most of the time it looks good, I did dislike the lens aberration though, it was hard to see things at times cause of that bubble effect they've used. But this is just a minor complaint.

Movies like this one should plant a seed in your mind, making you think it over and over again for days. I've seen it 2 hrs ago, and the charm is gone.

You can give this a try, but don't expect a Sci-Fi classic, this is not the case.