"Arrival" Just confirmed I'll never trust Rotten Tomatoes reviews

Rating: 5/10 (11 November 2016)

100% on Rotten Tomatoes? WTF?! I'm a big sci-fi movie fan especially if its story is quite philosophical and cerebral which IS the case with Arrival, but it got bogged down in the complexities of showing how humans would communicate with a superior alien intelligence amidst a distrusting and violent Earth society. Figure out how to communicate quickly enough with the aliens in order to prevent war is the main premise.
I got confused. There are dream like flashbacks that at first don't make sense, combined with a lot of Amy Adam's long drawn out ogle eye'd tearful stares of bewilderment morphing to fear bordering on amazement as she attempts to communicate and build a vocabulary as a translator with the alien entities. Yes! Great visuals and audio to keep me interested in how this was done.
But this movie relies heavily on building tension this way from an audience with high expectation and anticipation of what's going to happen next with a pay out that is a bit of a let down, drawn out and confusing to keep up with. I actually was struggling to keep from dozing off, but that may be from my trying to beat the anticipated crowds (going Rotten Tomatoes 100% review) at a midnight viewing the day before Friday release. There were just a handful in the audience that night.
Besides I was expecting something more profound than Jodie Foster's "Contact", a much better movie at relying on audience expectation and anticipation from experiencing a unique imagining of what it would be like to communicate with extraterrestrial alien intelligence that also explains how they overcome the limitations of space travel. "Arrival" doesn't even go there. But it's still a well made movie.