Good but also full of plot holes

Rating: 8/10 (15 July 2018)

This is the movie where scientists are smarter than God during most of the film but all of them turn into total idiots during the final scenes. I still like the movie a lot but the plot holes keep it from getting more stars -- and it probably doesn't deserve as many as I just now gave it.
No proof? Particularly, considering the type of scientist Dr. Arroway is, I give her a 0% chance that she would not have insisted on picking through all the static that her camera picked up during her journey. After all, isn't that what they did with the original signal? Pick through static trying to find meaning? Thus, it would have taken her more no more than a few moments to discover that she had 18 hours of static and that was proof enough of the alternate timeline.
Broken chair. The engineers would have tested that chair design over and over to see why it failed. They would have examined the broken materials for flaws and who knows what else. They would have examined the video for evidence of unusual stresses. They would have likely found no explanation for why it broke under the known forces... or how she got out of it and her armor so fast.
Occam's razor. The idea that Hadden was somehow brilliant and rich enough to pull this off as a hoax is ludicrous. He would have to be either a god himself to have done it single-handedly, or it would have taken thousands of people many years to pull it off. Conspiracies with too many people never stay secret. I don't know which is least plausible: designing a flawless giant machine (either untested or somehow hiding all the testing) loaded with new technology (such as a magically sealing door) that generates an amazing light and EM show; or somehow outmaneuvering all the radio telescopes on the planet with satellites (that no one bothered to look for) as the Earth rotates on its axis as well as orbiting the Sun (those would be some highly-maneuverable satellites) while broadcasting a fake signal in sync to anything looking at Vega. Occam's razor looks to be pointing away from Hadden to me.