Disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (28 March 2017)

Seemed intriguing at first. I was curious about how the linguist would interpret the alien method of communication. No dice. We are given images of her gazing at the computer screen at the alien symbols without the benefit of translation. Miraculously, she is able to turn circular blobs into English sentences.
There is a lot of jumping back and forth from present to past to present again and, in the end, what's assumed to occur in a chronological order, has occurred in a different sequence from what the audience is led to believe. The last quarter of the movie is rather confusing in this regard.
The military operation at the site of the U.S. alien ship is poorly managed. Our civilian heroine manages to thwart global disaster by calling the Chinese general on a sat phone she confiscated from a CIA operative on the post. A significant keynote in the movie, yet we are deprived of the contents of the conversation. I won't even get into how she manages to steal the phone, call the private number of the general, speak Mandarin to him, and in that one sentence, convince him to halt his aggression toward the alien ship. Really?
A lot of assumptions are made in order to forward the plot, but it doesn't work since the content is devoid of answers. Disappointing.