A pretentious movie that really isn't anything more than a second-rate sci-fi horror flick

Rating: 5/10 (16 March 2018)

The movie starts off slow and while it picks up some speed along the way, it never manages to reach a decent pace.
In roughly the first half of the movie we are introduced to our main character and supporting team. With the time it took to cover all of that, you'd expect to get something more than uninteresting stereotypes and simply dull personalities without substance, but that's exactly everything we got.
We're also supposed to care about the relationship of our lead character through what felt like a gazillion unnecessary flashbacks. It never worked for me and I found it distracting more than anything else.
During the second half of it's runtime, the movie tries to make us wanting to know what's going to happen next, what is the cause of all of it. It manages to succeed in this reasonably well, but it mostly does so by adding more confusion and questions into the mix. This wouldn't be such a big problem, were it not for the unbelievably unsatisfying, although beautifully portrayed scene near the end.
Oh, and it has a twist, which isn't really a twist, because it was so blatantly obvious already, not to mention cliché. Such a waste.
Visually it looks good. It's rich in it's own way, but not as rich as the trailer may lead you to believe. There's a mad dash of LSD here and there which I personally enjoyed. The world created within the shimmer sprouts a lot of interesting and original ideas. It's too bad that almost none of them are explored beyond the point of that "something is changing".
The small amount of horror and scary scenes are decent, but overall nothing too special and ultimately serve no true purpose. The exception is one scene, which is pretty unnerving to say the least. This scene sadly also makes it clear there's so much wasted potential in the rest of the movie.
Natalie Portman delivers a very good performance. Oscar Isaac is decent and Jennifer Jason Leigh appeared to be half afsleep during most of her screentime. The rest of the cast is subpar at best, but considering what they had to work with, I can hardly fault them for that.
I can usually suspend my disbelief very well when I'm entertained, but the amount of silly and illogical choices made by the characters were so plentiful I had a hard time doing so. There's one scene in particular which had me literally shaking my head.
All in all, this movie was a letdown with some good parts. Some may like it, some may not. I feel it could have been so much more. 5/10