Boring and tiresome, with little to offer.

Rating: Null/10 (23 July 2015)

Another psychological formulaic movie aimed at the non-athletic pre- teen to post teen who has an interest in science and does well in academics, and plays lots of online RTS computer games. In other words, this film was aimed at the proverbial male "nerd".
I'm a middle aged male who still plays computer games because I think they're fun, like a lot of males my age. I grew up with a generation that appreciated science, but also appreciated a good action film and athletics. There are a good chunk of adult males of a variety of ages who are not protein starved emaciated men who think of nothing but science and games. Those people are a minority.
Yet this movie, and the book upon which it was based, treat the audience as if it were the majority of the audience in the theatre. And, on top of that, even goes on to create an "empowerment scene" where the young male protagonists stands up for himself in a very physical scene. How tiring.
If you go to any college or university science lab, you'll note that the majority of the young scientists in training are regular normal people, male and female. In fact, you'll probably find several jocks in those classes, or even detectives or administration of justice majors learning about basic science as they pursue a career in forensics. The point being that the audience for whom this film was made, does not exist, or does not exist in the numbers both author and film makers think exists.
As such we get a film that's slow moving for the sake of it. Goes way overboard in looking at character development. Does not take one moment to look at "the bad guys" in any way, shape or form until the very end, and even then it's cursory at best, and leaves the audience wondering what they just watched.
Well shot, reasonably acted, and a lexicon that's at the 6th grade level for dialogue, this film is destined to be another early 2000s film that relied way too much on CGI, and did absolutely nothing with basic film making tools.
This film, if nothing else, should prove to Hollywood, London, Taiwan, Tokyo, Berlin, New York and even San Francisco, that the age of the sci-fi spectacular is dead. The film industry fell behind computer games (note; NOT video games, but online strategy games for the PC and Apple) in the 90s, and has been trying to grab young dollars ever since with bigger, splashier, and I'll add, a worse slew of films than the awful American International films that came out in the 1960s.
I've been playing RTS games since Dunce and Warcraft 1, and continue to indulge in them (though less frequently) with Starcraft 2 and Homeworld. And I can tell you right now that no amount of CGI wizardry replaces good characters and story, which this film lacks. Oh sure, the film makers try to create drama with over-the-top moments for the main character, and an idiotic parable at the end given the nature of the alien attack, but marry these with lukewarm CGI, and what do you have?
Finally, this movie attempted to mimic the Kubrick film making model with a nod towards the act structure of "Full Metal Jacket", even to the point of trying to mimic a few scenes, but again, there's a reason Kubrick was a genius. Without writing an even larger dissertation, he knew what he was doing. This director didn't.
There is nothing cerebral here, though the film makes a pretense of it. There is no high drama here, though again the film makes a stab at presenting the such. There is the story of a young man (boy) who is reared on games, and Orson Scott Card's fear of what that might entail.
Boring, tiresome, and absolutely nothing to offer. Avoid.