Too much honey on the cherry on top of the cake

Rating: 8/10 (1 February 2018)

The best of this trilogy of science fiction films for the end. This film is in many ways a very good film that deals with the arrival of aliens on earth and their first contact with human beings. It shows a little bit of the panic it creates on earth, like the evangelists and other apocalyptic prophets who announce the end of this world; then the jingoist bigots who require the extermination of these aliens from the very start to protect the human species. ETC. There is no end to human folly.
But at this level of the human response to twelve alien space crafts levitating in twelve places in the world, the film shows how easy the jingoists can win. The American side that started an intelligent mission to communicate with the aliens thanks to the help and competence of a linguist and a physicist, is also the first one shown as trying to blow up the spacecraft, which fails because the aliens detect the explosive and neutralize the bombs that explode within the spacecraft but with no damage caused.
The film insists on the fact that China, then Russia, then Sudan and Pakistan (I might be wrong on this fourth one) want to destroy the space crafts because they apparently misunderstood a message in the alien language and script. Only the American side of the linguistic communication is provided, though the film alludes to linguistic experts on the Chinese side. It is funny because the writing system is what looks like absolutely arbitrary scribbles and ink stains. The linguist manages to make everyone understand that these circles are words, and the physicist using some software manages to isolate some of these words, though we might think that a circle could be more than one concept and thus be a sentence.
But it is when that communication is becoming successful that the paranoia wins in the American camp as well and as fast as in the other camps in the world. It is an impossible and incredible act of rebellion of the linguist that avoids the worst end possible. She steals the phone of the top commander of the camp on the American site and she calls the General, head of the Chinese Liberation Army, and tells him what she thinks about the communication, and it all in Chinese, which is, of course, an advantage over all the military personnel who speaks one language, and even so quite often a dialect of this language, i.e. English. The effect is immediate. The Chinese general steps back and the military confrontation is avoided.
The end is a marshmallow in a fire. It melts down to some kind of sloppy sweet honey-covered soft candy and the aliens just dissolve their space crafts into thin air. And they go away. That's what I call real adventurous explorers. Then some mellow personal ending and touch to have the good Hollywoodian - or should I say Hollywoodistic, or even Hollywoosadistic - happy ending with love, marriage, birth, etc.
But remember! In all vast questions, it is always the linguist - especially if the linguist is a woman and if possible a structuralist - who knows better for a simple reason: there is no science if an articulated language does not exist FIRST. How could Homo Sapiens conceive the concept of ZERO if he did not have a language that had permitted his conceptualization power to develop? And the Mayas, the Chinese and later the Arabs, but probably some anterior communities in the Middle East, developed that ZERO without any communication among them, at least for the Chinese and the Mayas who did it first. And that ZERO will be imported into Europe by Descartes in the 17th century: "al gèbre" as he called it.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU