Do not trust the rating of this film

Rating: 1/10 (14 June 2012)

It is garbage. Trumped up, over-hyped and over marketed garbage. The only thing that was passably good were the effects but any film with a decent budget can put together some comparable SFX these days.
My biggest problem with this film was the characters or lack thereof. So this is apparently a trillion dollar mission to potentially make first contact with an alien species and yet it is populated by characters so stupid that they make George Bush look like a bright beacon of the Intelligentsia.
A prime example being Charlize Theron's character who wants to run a multi-trillion dollar corporate empire and yet has difficulty with a simple 50:50 decision on which way to run when a long thing spaceship is falling towards her. Imagine asking an 8 year old child 'You are at the base of a tree, it starts falling towards you. Do you: A) Run along the length of the tree and get crushed to death? or B) Step aside and watch the tree fall?' This is not even the worst of the stupidity displayed by the characters, for whom there was also zero development during the film. I did not care at all when any of the characters died and in most cases was happy to see them get what they deserved. There was no suspense, no real drama, no atmosphere and far too much stupidity to make the film palatable.
I have never walked out of a film in my life and the only reason I stayed in the theatre was to see if they explained the Jockey from Alien. When, unsurprisingly, this did not occur I was upset with myself for not just leaving earlier when I realised that the writers were treating the audience like magpies and basically going 'Look at the shiny shiny!' I can't actually be bothered writing any more about how awful this film was, it has stolen enough time from me already. See it on netflix when it will cost you couple bucks - even then it is probably not worth your time.