A missed opportunity

There are way too many opinions on here from mindless, action movie junkies and pseudo-film intellectuals alike. Essentially the movie was very good for the first two-thirds of its running time but then simply ran out of gas. All of the main characters were nicely developed but many were left forgotten about or wasted by the end...Adam Driver's, Bill Camp's, and Sam Shepherd's characters in particular. I was glad it didn't devolve into a Steven Spielberg melodrama but the end was cold and barren. The very ending, hinting at this as a next step in evolution, was intriguing but came only in the last few frames of the film and wasn't enough to save the sloppy ending. Many of the greatest sci-fi movies (i.e., 2001: A Space Odyssey) certainly don't tie up every loose end (nor should they) but the kind of questions left in the wake of this movie weren't exactly thought provoking either, rather it simply left me with "what was the point of that?". I could have watched E.T. (far from a favorite of mine) and seen a much more interesting film. The topics it did introduce (parenting, religion, privacy, existentialism) were barely hinted at before they were forgotten, hence the missed opportunity. A similar (and better, though not flawless) film I'd recommend is Alex Proyas' Knowing.