How to annihilate 2 hours of your life

Rating: 1/10 (9 April 2018)

Natalie Portman is good at delivering the troubled widow at the beginning. Much less convincing later on when the story reveals her past military career. It's impossible to imagine a person like her in the military, not even in a Sci-Fi movie! She volunteers on a suicide mission but her motives are not clear, probably she want's to know what happened to her husband? But maybe it is guilt, because she betrayed him? We don't know what drives her and this makes it difficult to connect or identify with her. Other characters are even weaker except Jennifer Jason Leigh, she is the only one who seems to know what she is doing.
The story itself is weak with minimal development and engagement. Would you send a group of female students with a psychologist as a leader to investigate the supernatural/alien/all-life-on-eart-altering-phenomenon? Not that being females is the problem, after all the male missions have failed, but none of them is able to understand the weight of the task. It looks like they are going for a picnic in a exotic resort, hilarious to see the M4A1 rifle being carried like a lady bag (by the handle). Most of the movie is a walk in the artificial (studio) park with occasional quarreling and psychotic episodes between the girls. The story does not evolve but stumbles until right before the end.
The final scene lacks dialogue and is just visual, this is why some viewers have seen parallels with the closing scene of Kubrick's 2001. While Kubrick's finale elevates the story (and creates an open end) this one just does nothing of that. We see some entity (or more of them) but do not know what they want. There is some trivial explanation from Lena (Portman) itself, that the entity tried to create something new. Oh really? Wow. The closing scene then shows a very predictable hint to a possible sequel. No elevation here just a cheap cliche. After seeing this I understand why some people hate & avoid Sci-Fi movies.