Pretty in places, but rather weak

Rating: 5/10 (24 March 2018)

I really can't see that this deserves the high rating it has here and elsewhere.
The story is that a meteorite or something has come down and hit a lighthouse somewhere. Then there is what they are calling the 'shimmer' surrounding it - some sort of boundary that looks like the sunlight shining on an oily film on moving water. This isn't impenetrable; people can walk in, but those who have done so have tended to not come back out. And the shimmer is moving outwards; the fear being that it is going to spread round the whole world.
Lena is a biologist, played by Natalie Portman. Her husband was in one of the teams of soldiers sent in there and he is the only person to come back out, seemingly 'unofficially'. He ends up in some sort of medical facility with his organs failing. She volunteers to join the next group in. She is qualified for this because of the combination of now being a biology professor but previously having been a soldier.
And right there I hit my first problem with this film. The problem being Portman looks as if she is showing the effects of a lifetime of hard dieting. She looks underweight and as if she always has been, looking particularly frail and narrow-shouldered when put into combat fatigues. I just couldn't buy her as an ex-soldier, even one who has been out of the army for a few years.
Lena's fellow-members of her all-female team all turn out to have Problems. I won't list them - everyone will have seen them before in a thousand films and telly shows, especially soaps. So we know before it happens there is going to be trouble with them. And, lo and behold, Lena turns out to have some extra Problems too: with her marriage, so she's carrying a load of guilt. All of these assorted Problems are quite shallowly portrayed.
The sci-fi elements of the story are sketchy and really don't make a lot of sense. They were clearly meant to be Meaningful, though, but what Meaning they were meant to be full with, I suspect the writing team (if there was one) never got round to thinking about.
Some of the visual effects, though not wildly impressive, were a bit out of the usual, and colourful and striking; also, there were the makings of a good and original story there, if only someone had put in the work. So I've given it five points for those two. However, I've withheld five points for the widespread sketchiness, the hackneyed, soapy chunks of the script and the unconvincingness of the characters. So ... five stars on IMDb.