What's The Opposite of Truly Great?

Rating: 1/10 (20 April 2017)

Did they have a wrap party at the end of filming? And did everyone congratulate everyone for making a truly great movie? And was there a young child that looked around and said "Are you people insane?"
Okay, I sincerely doubt there was an emperor has no clothes kid on the set.
But the idea that this is some smart movie that will make intelligent people think about what divides us instead of what unites us is type of trite belief that ISIS will sit around a campfire with us if only we would quit shooting at them.
Forget the bad bad science of the movie where a linguist can learn to communicate with the aliens in such a relatively short time.
Forget that the only woman in the film is the one that has the desire to make peace instead of war with the aliens (perpetuating the belief that if women were in charge of the world we would have an end to wars).
Forget that such an advanced civilization could actually find us in the vast universe and still not figure out a way to communicate with us instead of we with them.
No, the worst thing about this movie is that it telegraphed every scene 10 minutes ahead. I found myself mouthing dialogue seconds ahead (It wasn't meeting them. It was meeting you) and hoping against hope there would some unforeseen twist like the alien being the father of the little girl though that's a science fiction cliché. Didn't anyone reading the script find themselves thinking they've seen this movie before?
How many movies have been made where the brave voice in the wilderness can't get anyone to listen to them before mob gets out their guns and start shooting? Will she get through to the Chinese boss before the authorities have her shot? Gee, will Lassie get the townsfolk to understand that Timmy fell down the well?
The director must have kept telling Amy Adams to tone it down because she never really does more than act pensive as she is made more and more aware of what the key is. You'd have thought it was every day that she met some aliens and saved the world.
Jeremy Renner plays a physicist though he could have been playing a travelling anvil salesman and it probably wouldn't have changed a single word of his dialogue. If he did any real physics in the movie I must have blinked as it went by.
And whose idea was it to cast Forest Whitaker? What a waste of talent. He probably didn't have to memorize any lines because it was obvious what he had to say. They could have gotten a film student at scale for how much his skills were used.
Unlike some I didn't consider the movie a waste of my time. A film this bad has some entertainment value as long as one is not expecting Shakespeare.