Sub Par Scifi Thriller

Rating: 2/10 (18 January 2017)

This movie is completely overrated. Interstellar it is not. The Day the Earth Stood Still remake it is not. It isn't even in the same league as the very average Contact. Which at least on first watching holds your interest, but doesn't stand up to repeated viewing.
The science aspects in the film are laughable. I have no idea why it has such high praise or has such a high IMDb rating. Amy Adams is quite good. I don't think I have seen her in a "bad movie" up until this. Not that the movie is terrible, it isn't (well not most of it anyway). The special effects (other than alien design) were acceptable, but that isn't my gripe.
The movie is full of clichés. Such as angry generals who want to blow everything up and only one person can stop them. Well actually that's basically the entire main plot. The aliens are laughable. I've seen more convincing ones in 1950 B movies. Seriously they're just large Octopi.
The entire movies message is that if peaceful aliens arrive on Earth we should be "nice" to them. This is where the overdone angry army officials come in. You would think, in real life, many of these generals would've already seen this type of film and wouldn't be so eager to blow everything up. I mean lets be honest, if aliens have the technology to travel across vast regions of space, manipulate gravity and even time. It's safe to assume they probably have the capabilities to withstand any primitive attack of the type humans currently have the ability to throw at them. For me this is where the entire movie falls down. It's comparable to the supposedly all powerful alien football in ID2, which isn't capable of stopping the nasty aliens from wiping out it's entire species..... It makes no sense and overall ruins the movie.
I don't even want to get into the ridiculousness of the stuff about language and how difficult it is for the humans and aliens to communicate. If the aliens can see through time, isn't it safe to assume they would have learned human language before even setting off on their mammoth trek through/across space/dimensions? "I know lets just turn up on another planet and see what happens?". Were they drunk or summin? If they were that would at least make some sense but then after sobering up why still hang around for a few more months? The science, as mentioned, also makes no sense. Nor do the decisions the aliens make. Apparently the aliens written and vocal language do not correlate. Well this then raises the question of how they managed to build ships that can presumably cross dimensions. You cannot communicate rapidly or in-depth by sign language alone! How the hell do they communicate mathematics? I kinda feel that other reviewers of this movie have completely let me down. Which makes me even more disappointed at how "average" the movie actually is. I was expecting more.