I should have enjoyed this but I'm a horrible, grumpy old man

Rating: 6/10 (23 November 2016)

This review contains enough spoilers to let you guess what the movie is about, and this film is very much about a spoiler gimmick, so watch out. Call me a grumpy old jerk but I was unable to suspend my disbelief for this film. It's good for all the reasons people say it's good, but dragging in aliens who want us to solve a very particular kind of puzzle, the kind of thing that our enormous scientific community was specifically set up to solve, in order to give us superpowers, is very boring. It's all too absurdly convenient and has very little of the kind of problems we as a species actually have to deal with. I'm tired of this kind of movie. I do want to give it a higher score because it was a genuinely clever film and the portrayal of the international military situation was really timely and spot-on, but come on, the world's real problems don't have much to do with this kind of escapism anymore. There, I've used this review to vent and I feel better now.