Obsession for Extra-terrestrials

Rating: 7/10 (14 January 2017)

Short version, okay to wait for renting it, does not demand the big screen....and yes the film is not an action flick, but nice enough to see and then think/talk about it with friends/family. A fine Friday night before dinner film.... The less you know about it, probably the better.
Longer review, mild spoilers included...
My 8th grade boys and I enjoyed this (but the same week, they were buzzing more about the TV show "People of Earth" for what it's worth.) Having recently read a book by Steven Johnson arguing on behalf of the more intricate stories in TV shows as a sign of growing intelligence or something like that, it was interesting to see this film, heralded as a smart sci-fi film, but with such a slim story line.
Of course the story line does get a bit curved or warped if you will, and there is a whiff of romance. But I almost felt like this could have been an excellent Twilight Zone (a moment of silence for the failed efforts to revive that classic show).
I did find myself wondering about the 12 different locations (Sudan, Pakistan made the cut along with the US, the UK, Russia and China, so was North Korea left off the list...was it targeted at the top 10 war-torn, or war-friendly??). I also wondered if each arrival came with two 7-footers (not the NBA type).
But the spare story-telling might have been intentional, the vague swirling images of our visitors....and the stellar, scene-stealing soundtrack all could help make less more. Surely the romance tried that inverse relationship, that definitely felt like a jig-saw puzzle missing a lot of pieces. Heck, even when the team visited with Abbott and Costello, they didn't use the whole time allotted? That part bugged me (but of course I also wondered if the aliens were initially communicating to the canary in the dilithium crystal mine).
In hindsight, or is it foresight, could the linguistic relativity have also given Amy Adams' character other flash-forward-backward visions. Opened up new stories to tell. Or made for some 2001 homage montage.
Anyways, the austere atmosphere for everything about the film worked okay, and I almost would like to see a mash-up of an old Obsession TV commercial with the alien interactions. Cloud chamber chic! Because of the more subtle nature of the film, if you didn't catch it on the big screen, I think that is fine (or if you want to save a couple of months worth of Netflix charges....) It was somewhat exciting to see the first shots approaching the alien ships, and the interaction (which you may have seen a little of in previews).
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly I went looking just now for how quickly people could translate such a truly foreign language, and came across this article that I enjoyed, and you might as well.
Hmmm, not allowing the link so it's at slate.com wit Betty Birner, a linguist, from 11/22/16.
Actually she dismisses the "linguistic relativity" that I had heard about before, and also it has the name of the theory that I didn't quite catch in the film : Sapir-Whorf.
Lastly I saw some comments in the chat area, and I do think that this T2 film argues for determinism, and that always gives me the free-willies.