Gripping and interesting alien contact story

Rating: 8/10 (25 November 2016)

A more than decent SF film which goes for the intellectual approach and ideas instead of explosions and guns, and gets quite emotional in some scenes without becoming silly. Actually, there was one explosion, which was not necessary - the reason behind it was probably to raise the tension but I thought the human/alien meetings were strong and strange enough to do without additional scares. The communications by glyphs was a good idea for a visual medium.
The military angle of the operation was rather cliché, and I didn't understand why they didn't use the good old field telephone instead of radios when faced with communications problems.
I adored the spaceship design, especially how they took the common UFO-like lens shape and played with our perception habits by simple turning it by 90° - cute "twist".
At the heart of the movie is Amy Adams, she carries it with ease and is completely convincing, every single other role is just necessary padding.