The whole movie begs for explanations and answers: who are these aliens, what do they want, how do they communicate, how will humans understand them, and can humans cooperate when faced with a crisis? It is, therefore, a bit of a disappointment when none of these questions are satisfactorily answered – not that there could be satisfactory answers to such sci-fi premises. The point of the movie is the process: how do Americans, and specifically linguist Amy Adams, go about addressing the issues. Enjoy the ride – and both Adams and Jeremy Renner are pleasant company – and don’t worry about a destination.

The story, and the telling, were too pat for a documentary: more often than not, it seemed like scenes were being staged for the camera, rather than that the camera  happened to be there. The affectlessness of Aishorplan, the 13-year starlet, didn’t add to the convincing. But I can never get too much of those Mongolian steppes and life in a yurt.

Hard to believe, after Inglorious Basterds, that someone else would cast Brad Pitt as an American (ok, Canadian) who could pass himself off as a Frenchman/German behind German lines. Any relationship between his French accent and that of the Parisian he was supposed to be was entirely coincidental. Of course, he was no more convincing as an RAF Wing Commander or Marion Cotillard’s lover. His acting, in general, would not have passed muster with the Ensemble Theatre here in Santa Barbara. But he did wear nice clothes.

The plot was nonsense; the whole film came across as a film exercise. We had no emotional involvement with any of the characters; we just watched, with some interest, how director Robert Zemeckis constructed his film. It did give you things to talk about when it was over.

If I’m going to sit through a long, boring movie I want it to at least have a central character I like, or at least enjoy looking at. Here, by contrast, the focal figure, Dona Clara (played by Sonia Braga), was the least attractive person on view: stubborn, haughty, insensitive, selfish, living lazily on her pension. All her relatives, their friends, her landlord, the lifeguard, even the gigolo were much pleasanter, more reasonable and better looking. Maybe this was a brilliantly subversive movie, designed to challenge the viewer’s expectations that we would root for a widow being forced out of her apartment by a greedy developer. Otherwise, and this is the way I read it, the movie was a misfire.