What happened?!

Rating: Null/10 (9 July 2011)

My husband and I went to see this after one of our kids said they enjoyed it. We sure wanted to like it. After viewing the film however, enjoy is not exactly a word we could really use of our experience, but we certainly thought there was some fine acting by several of the young people in the movie, especially the lead boy and the girl, the film-maker boy and the fire cracker kid. There was a lot of exciting but confusing action in the story and not enough emphasis on filling us in (as far as we could see) as to what the "alien" had been through in captivity on Earth - so to us the very valid point of view of the alien and his sympathetic scientist-friend seemed lost in the shuffle for the most part. We had a lot of questions such as what exactly was the alien doing with those humans he captured? And why did the space ship fall apart into cubes? And what is the relationship between the magnetic issues and the water tower? This made the end a bit puzzling, although it tried hard to be poignant. The plot sort of reminded me of a "Star Trek" episode where mining operations were interrupted on a planet because a "monster" was killing the miners, until Spock did a "mind-meld" with the "beast" and found out it was a desperate mother trying to protect her children in their eggs. She would stop killing and help the miners get the ore they wanted from the shells, if they'd stop killing her babies.