Great concept, but flawed

Rating: 5/10 (12 December 2019)

Great concept, some great visuals, and it was nice to see women in the lead roles, but there are so many issues with tone, plot points, and the characters that it made it tough for me to like it. There were lots of groans in the first half from those I watched it with, and I don't think director Alex Garland helped himself with the way he told the story. It was pretty cool to contemplate an alien presence that interacts in such a fundamentally different and unexpected way, which was reminiscent of Lem/Tarkovsky's Solaris, and I also imagined a subtext of death being an annihilation of one's atoms, returning them to the universe, where they live on in myriad other forms. There's no poetry here though, just an Americanization of Solaris and Stalker, and I just wish it had been better executed.