Begins well but degenerates rapidly

Rating: 4/10 (11 May 2015)

===Spoilers==
Since this is a genre movie, I would give it a 7 rating for people who like science fiction.
This movie was pretty high on a list of all-time favorite science fiction movies, so I checked it out.
Like most modern movies, it looks great, and looking great gets people onto social media quickly to call it their favorite movie, until the next one. Every quick shot, and they are all as quick as a pop music video, is just so, down to the strand of hair that falls prettily across Jennifer Connelly's face.
Today's movies' "great SFX," however, are simply the effects used in a bank advertisement on TV in 6 months.
Also like many ambitious modern movies for a general audience, the writers couldn't figure out what they wanted to accomplish. They started with some interesting ideas and then couldn't find a way to resolve them satisfactorily. Story threads were spun out, never to be integrated into a fabric that was satisfying. Characters more interesting than the leads made appearances and were then dropped. (The psychopathic detective being the main one. Why did he even exist?) The film's world, for some reason, is noir-ish. (Cough, cough, Blade Runner).
It's just a style, though, and an obvious one for a world that is always night. Otherwise it's not organic to the film. Here's one place the writers could have challenged themselves. Since the world is being run by aliens trying to figure out humans, in order to save themselves, why not make the setting 'inappropriate,' the opposite of noir? I'm thinking the set of 'Happy Days,' but in sepia. How much weirder would that have been? But of course the requisite sci-fi tropes must be obeyed, unless you want to do something new and more interesting.
The first appearance of the aliens almost brought me to laugh, but that's a personal thing. I was reminded of the aliens in the first Star Trek original series episode. The aliens are almost all interchangeable, except for a really powerful one, a somewhat considerate one, and a young one. All the scenes with them are wooden and terrible.
The moral of the story is practically in quotes, with big flashing arrows, toward the end of the film. The lead character tells the last alien that the soul isn't located in the brain's memories, but in the heart. And then he clicked his ruby slippers and sailed off back to Kansas.
Our hero bests the powerful alien--the "boss" at the end of the highest level of your video game--then uses the spaceship city's structure to create the environment where he can re-meet the luminous but vacant Ms Connelly.
The movie had something of a classic Twilight Zone vibe to it, and the mystery of the Beach is interesting at first. It's interest comes crashing down when it's revealed to be a poster on a brick wall. This wall serves as the fuselage for the city/spaceship. When it's broken down, however, there is no catastrophic decompression. The detective just lazily drifts out into space, while the rest of the cast stands around. This leads, obviously, to the idea that we haven't reached "reality" yet in this universe. The writers though, apparently didn't see this or . . . . what?
So Twilight Zone-ish, but Rod Serling could have done it better in half an hour on a shoestring budget.