Could have been a lot better if tweaked

Rating: 5/10 (18 December 2017)

There were so many small problems in this film, they coalesced into one big problem: namely that the movie was not really a creative whole. Mistakes include the casting: Forest Whitaker is too old to play an army colonel. Jeremy Renner, a terrific actor, has his talents largely wasted in a vacuously written character (not much he could do about that). Lots of leaps in logic. It seemed the director wanted to get the film over with after the first half. It just didn't seem to go anywhere. Another issue is that to really understand the 'message' of the film, you need to know something about linguistics. I've studied linguistics and there is a reference made to the 'Whorf Hypothesis' often called the 'Whorf-Sapir hypothesis,' which, if you're not acquanted with it, will probably make you lose sight of the theme or not have the 'insight' about the theme. I won't mention the concept here. It's not that complicated, but if you read up on it, it should help fill in at least some of the holes in the script. In addition, and this isn't a spoiler since it is mentioned in the first 15 minutes of the film, a sizeable number of alien spacecraft land on Earth simultaneously. This trope has been done to death in horror/sci-fi films and on TV, so to make a good film with this premise is all that more difficult.