Needed More Meat To Chew On

Rating: 6/10 (27 August 2017)

(Flash Review)
Latest film from the director of Sicario. Thus I had hopeful expectations. The story started off with some strong, minimal and arresting imagery as once again aliens visit Earth and park themselves across the globe and sit their silently awaiting human contact. The protagonist is a linguistics expert and is tasked with attempting to communicate with the aliens to learn their intentions. Nations across the world attempt their own approaches for communication. Will all nations take a calm and peaceful approach or will some use fear as a means to attack and will humans be able to work together? What do the aliens want and are they peaceful? These are the core questions. While the film built up a great and compelling opening it began to falter for me as the process of finding these answers became repetitive and of minimal intrigue. The linguistics partner is a physicist yet never uses his knowledge to advance the story and becomes an underdeveloped sidekick. There are many vague and open-ended aspects to the film which can be fun to ponder but there wasn't enough meat or depth to mentally chew on to keep my brain processing potential possibilities. For me the film fizzled out and didn't amaze me.