Best Picture? Yeah, Not quite...

Rating: 7/10 (5 March 2017)

No spoilers: Usually when a movie has such an abundance of one star and 10 star reviews, one can safely assume that the movie was fiercely hyped. I advise throwing out all of the 'oh my god! worst/best film ever!' reviews. The truth is this movie had a bunch of pretty big flaws, but still had a compelling story and good production values. Depending on what you like, you will most likely give this movie 4-8 stars, and that is what it deserves. How this film was nominated for an Academy Award is beyond me. (Great to see an SF movie nominated, just wish it had been The Lobster instead.)
This movie is speculative fiction, but the lack of science in this film is devastatingly apparent. There are a couple of other points that seemed very weakly written, but the movie on whole was well crafted. Acting, production values, score, etc. were all solid. The concept of the movie was great, but the plot and script needed work. I personally found the film engaging and was not bored. There is enough here to think about, but so much more could have been done with this film. Personally, I rate it a 6.5/10.
== SPOILER ALERT == So, the big problems as I saw them were in the plot. Once communication was achieved, data is collected and understanding of the language advances without any real reveal on how this was accomplished. We are just supposed to swallow that and move on. OK, maybe, but... it's just too much. As someone interested in linguistics, I want to know more about the possible processes used to communicate with an organism that does not share our cultural objects, our environment, an alphabet, etc. It struck me as odd that a classical linguist would be given this job instead of some scientist who studied other species and non-human communication. Wouldn't a Jane Goodall have had far greater insight into the language of an alien race?
The second big gripe I had was one single line at the end of the film. The linguist hugs her colleague and they realise they want to be together. OK, boring, but fine. Then she says this one line, basically if you knew what would happen in your life ahead of time, would you change anything? Why would she ask this question? It seemed to me that if she had truly 'learned' this alien language and all the philosophy it included, she never would have asked this question. She would have accepted it all, and not asked something so 'Philosophy 101'. She would have known there was no changing anything and that things are only as they are. I'm not a philosopher or a linguist, but I never really bought that she was either.
On the plus side, I thought the 'memory/vision' flashes were cleverly done. We viewed them as dreams or memories when they in fact a glimpse of the future. I felt like they pulled this off quite well, and that twist of the plot was clever. For me, this is where the movie scored extra points, along with the visual communication aspect of the aliens. Just different enough to give the brain some food for thought.
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The fact that this movie was nominated for an award is an insult to SF. I have seen several far, far better pictures in the last few years. I cannot believe that this really viewed as the best one by the Academy. Unfortunately this just shows the politics and sway that factor into the nominations. By all means, watch this film. It was enjoyable and good entertainment. If you want to watch good SF though, give The Lobster a try.