A hole ridden plot stretched too thin

Rating: 4/10 (29 March 2017)

I had several problems with this film, but I think the biggest was something I found out from someone who loved it - it was based on a short story. Yep, not enough plot to stretch out for a two hour movie. To say the pace is a little slow is an understatement of the highest order - things move so slowly in some spots as to make glaciers look at their speedometer to see if they are speeding. This explains all the long silences, the endless scenes of people looking off into the distance maybe at the shell (what they call the alien spacecraft - why, never explained like so much of this movie).
However, there are some good parts to the movie. The CGI is really well done, the aliens themselves are fairly well conceived - I would have liked it if they actually floated and perhaps came from a gas-giant environment but this is sort of spoiled by one scene. I thought the alien language wasn't too bad. It was different enough from Earth languages to seem alien - although again later when it is revealed to have a 'spoken form' that the heroine somehow understands the shine is somehow taken off.
The second biggest problem I have with the film is the premise that our heroine can look into the future because she immersed herself in the language. This led to a second plot that is essentially a mother-daughter story which didn't interest me in the slightest. I swear, I would have found a documentary on toe fungus of greater interest. To make this worse, this whole story is intersperse throughout the whole film - it starts with a 10 minute montage of this story.
Finally it is presumed that she shares this concept of looking forward and back in time with others and while she doesn't change things in her life, what about her students? Really? Wouldn't at least one of them, try to change a mark they got in class, or stop their mother from being hit by a car, or hell, going all Groundhog Day and changing their approach to a girl they really like until they get it right. There is a saying, "to know the future is to change it," and I will swear to all I consider holy that if I'd known this film would be like this, I wouldn't have watched it.