Underwhelming, but thought provoking and well acted

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2016)

This movie attempts to depict what a real first contact might look like. For SciFi fans, that's practically the Holy Grail. Unfortunately, it's also extremely difficult to pull off, especially for those of us who love the genre. (I've been trying to outdo Hollywood with my own musings for years and seldom manage to do better.)
There are several new ideas incorporated in this latest visionary story, and though I found them a bit adolescent, I am happy that regular people are realizing that our being contacted by an intelligent and necessarily more advanced species is going to be far more impactful for us than, say, the cure for cancer or the creation of machine super-intelligence.
The long and the short of it is, this movie asks you to overlook a simple point about the whole predicament as it's presented. And I can't say that stopped me from enjoying the ride, but it did disappoint a bit. The people I was with thought the movie well above average and they enjoyed it more than I did, but they weren't SciFi aficionados, like me, so the bar was a lot lower for them.