Visuals triumph over story

Rating: 5/10 (25 April 2018)

Lena is a geneticist whose husband reappears after going missing on a mission a year ago. All is not well with him. Lena and 4 other women follow in his footsteps into a phenomenon called the Shimmer (from which he is the only person to have re-emerged in its 3-year existence), something which is growing from the site of a meteorite hit. Strange things happen.
Natalie Portman is Lena in Alex Garland's follow-up to Ex Machina, a cerebral sci-fi mystery. There is good and bad here. The good is mostly visual: there is fantastic use of locations and effects, and terrific cinematography.
The bad is that the story seems to think it has great depth, but I couldn't see any. It seems to think it's pretty brainy, but I thought not. It contains things like flashback sequences which ought to be reflected in what's going on presently but, if so, I couldn't see how. In short, I found it a straightforward story which went on far too long, and with an incredibly jumbled conclusion.
I was impressed with the look, and some intense emotion in the first 5 minutes, following which it dragged.