Alieni ex machina

Rating: 1/10 (16 January 2017)

You can remove the aliens altogether and the story would be equally absurd, although it seems the direction prefers to employ them in order to bypass logic/common sense, especially regarding the concept of time.
Time is just 'consequential change', and in measuring it we rely upon the regularity of a repeated process, as recorded in our memory. So how does learning a language factor in here? You neither perceive/experience phenomena/events nor foresee them through language, but through senses and intelligence. How would learning a spoken/written language boost your brain processing power to the scale of calculating an infinite multitude of future scenarios (basically chaos), or boost your memory so you can read all this info from a screenful of circles (so that you could then foresee what the dying wife of a Chinese general would tell him on her deathbed in one specific scenario)? Thus the movie results in a chain of suspensions of disbelief, fully removing the sci from sci-fi...
Either that, or it's all happening inside the protagonist's head as a dream, hallucination or some type of seizure causing all the incoherence (judging from the coffee bean ships with fish-tank squids squirting semantics through coffee mug stains, it's probably happening in a coffee shop). Unfortunately the message trying to be conveyed is lost in pseudoscience - and the protagonist's choice doesn't follow the movie's logic either. If she can foresee the future, why not choose the best one out of the infinite possible scenarios of if-thens that are unlocked for her from alieni ex machina, surely there would be some better future in an infinity of if-thens than just the set-in-stone one she keeps hallucinating of.
Alternate gist of it in sci-fi terms:
Space-faring squids infect human patient zero with a brain virus which she proceeds to spread all over the planet in order to make humans ready for when they'll need our 'help' after the Earth has performed 3k helices around the Sun from the start of infection. The virus enters victims through an undisclosed procedure, as the movie starts with patient zero already experiencing the virus' effects (probably through some type of focused radiation at extraplanetary distance), and works by implanting directives as personal memories to the CNS and achieving the zombiefication of the victim who, due to a clever subroutine of the virus, now believes these directives to be his/her own choice (as he/she now 'remembers the future' from interpreting coffee mug stains which he/she believes to be language symbols of a space-faring species). The intricacies of this long processing of humans are probably stuff for a sequel and the stepping stone to their Arrival.