*** SPOILERS*** A dreary, morose Close Encounters

Rating: 1/10 (13 November 2016)

The aliens have arrived. And they are – Holy Calamari People, Batman! – giant squid. The giant squid communicate in writing by shooting magical retractable ink out of their tentacles onto a transparent wall. It's up to linguist Amy Adams to decipher their communication before the other crazy countries in the world try to blow up everything.
The Calamari People, who float in a room of steam, write in circles – which is apparently how they experience time. Without a beginning or end. They can see their lives in their entirety. And the Calamari People are here to give humanity a gift, we find out: Once you unlock their language and become fluent, you will experience time in the circular way they do. It's a lot like becoming fluent in French and suddenly realizing why the French love Jerry Lewis so much.
From the lack of character and character development to the way the story unfolds, the movie is like watching a real-time long shot of a grave digger digging a grave on the grayest of all days. It's morose and filled with dread. Monotone and monotonous. Shovel after shovel after shovel, and he never seems like he is getting anywhere.
The entire pic is filled with "music" that is just a bunch of low hums that underscore the dread and monotone. It doesn't give us a clue to how we should be feeling. And that's why I go to the movies, to feel. How about awe at seeing the spaceships? The joy and celebration of the first breakthrough of communication? Nope, we get tedium and low bassy hums.
Jeremy Renner plays a physicist who doesn't do any physics, and he nicknames the two Calamari People we see Abbott & Costello. Although you can't tell them apart, Abbott becomes my favorite character in the movie because he gets to die midway through and doesn't have to suffer through the rest of the film. Lucky Abbott.
Throw in voiceovers and flashbacks that we find out are really flashforwards because time is actually circular to Amy Adams, and you have a film that yearns to be so much more than the real-time gravedigging than it is. It's the type of intellectual pretentiousness I thought only the Nolans could put on the screen.