Really Bad

Rating: 2/10 (12 November 2016)

I felt the need to post this review, because I couldn't understand how so many people gave it a positive review.
Aliens land on the Earth, and the US military wanted to find someone trained in linguistics. So far, so good. Then, for reasons that escaped me, the military was trying to explain to Amy Adams how to do her job, even though she is apparently an expert at it, but okay. I thought the development of the story was a little slow, but with Amy Adams, Jeremey Renner, and Forest Whitaker, they could read off of diner menu and be pretty entertaining.
Then it started to go off-track. One of the US soldiers, because our military has to be portrayed this way, tries to kill the aliens, even though they are seemingly behind some sort of barrier to protect them from the atmosphere. And, even though there are plenty of military personnel there, they apparently forgot to fence off the aliens so that no one unauthorized gets in.
Then, in a move that makes no sense, the Chinese decide they are going to attack. Maybe a slightly racist assumption, but we can let that go. But the aliens have been peaceful, and they are in vessels made of unknown materials, that have lasted a trip through the cosmos, but the Chinese have issued an ultimatum, to a superior species (in all likelihood), that they are unlikely to understand.
Then the movie completely derails. Amy Adams gets General Chang to change his mind, because she has a conversation with him, 18 months in the future, where she apparently knows what his wife's dying words to him were.
None of the movie made a lot of sense. Peripheral scenes show an accident in the parking lot because people were running out, for little apparent reason, riots in the streets, looting, TV commentators demanding we fire a shot across the bow.
When I left the theater, which was pretty crowded, there was no applause, and no conversation that one might expect to see at the end of a thought-provoking movie.