Space Invaders, Part I: A Thinker

ARRIVAL (B) - It's hard to imagine a movie so smitten with wonder turning out so flat and uninspiring.

Amy Adams gives it the old college try as Louise Banks, a linguist recruited by the government to try to decipher the language of an inscrutable species that has invaded Earth by dropping 12 giant ovoid pods across the globe, including one in Montana. Adams is haunted by the memory of the drawn-out death of her daughter, Hannah.

Jump cuts to her days with her daughter are interspersed with dramatic scenes of Louise and a co-hort, a physicist named Ian (a subdued Jeremy Renner), team up to catalog sounds and images in a bid to communicate with the strange beings, who look like a variation on Thing from the "Addams Family," giant walking hands with seven fingers, whose tips can splay like a Venus fly-trap.

The bottom of the spaceship opens on a synchronized basis, allowing Louise and the team to enter and hang out in gravity-defying digs to chat up the aliens through a clear wall. Do they come in peace? Do they want to destroy the world?

World leaders scramble in fear, working together through the United Nations to cooperate and put up a united front. But that lasts only so long before China and Russia begin to pick up seemingly hostile language from the intruders. Soon the U.S. is on its own, and Louise must try to reason with the military leaders who are itching to blow the big egg into oblivion. Will the Earthlings prevail? Will they somehow find common ground to defend humanity?

Those government and military officials are ridiculously portrayed here as one-dimensional, as if this were a cheap World War II B-movie. Forest Whitaker sleepwalks through the role as the colonel who recruits Louise based on her work interpreting a terrorist video. (He tries to woo her by saying he was impressed by how she made quick work of that video. She snaps back, "You made quick work of those terrorists." That's the sort of campy dialogue that permeates the film.)

Whitaker spouts cliches and drily expositive dialogue. So does Michael Stuhlbarg ("A Serious Man") as the lead CIA agent in charge of the operation. Both actors have rarely been so poorly utilized on the screen.  All of the characters are wooden, almost intentionally so. Adams is a strong lead, but she does nothing exceptional here, nothing most other actresses couldn't do.

That's the main beef with "Arrival," which at times can be mesmerizing, such as when the aliens shoot out the smoky/inky substance that forms symbols in the air, the symbols that Louise strives to puzzle together. Mostly, though, Canadian director Dennis Villeneuve ("Incendies," "Sicario") displays a visual style that is capably Canadian.

The second half starts to knit together the flashbacks with the present-day invasion. When Louise suddenly cracks the code, it comes as a surprise, because there's no sensible explanation for it. But as we race to the dramatic conclusion, the secret becomes apparent, and while it's fairly clever as plot twists go, it also feels like a lazy cheat.

This is a movie that wants you to think that it's a lot more complicated and clever than it really is. (It's written by horror guy Eric Heisserer from a novel by Ted Chiang.) It provides the illusion of mysterious and profound storytelling. But overall, it's achingly old-fashioned, clunky and corny.

And then there's the ending. Without revealing too much, the takeaway message of the movie is borderline offensive: A woman could be an accomplished academic, and she might possibly have what it takes to try to save the world, but what matters in the end for a woman is to find the right man who will be a solid provider. For all its hopes and dreams for humanity, that's the bad taste that "Arrival" leaves in your mouth.