here is why this is good....

Sorry OP but i think you're missing the point of what makes a good film. A film doesn't have to be be deep or be multi layered but a film should have good writing and direction if you want your audience to enjoy it!

Upon watching the first scene i thought maybe this film may have some promise but as soon as the mediocre writing set in (the Skype converstaion with her dad in which he details where she can obtain a gun from the basement is one example) it became apparent it was going to be a slap dash generic flick.

I felt the film didn't know what it wanted to be at times, a serious horror or a parody so tonally it was mess.
It was far to cliched, which to me comes across as being lazy. Yes you may wanna make a scary alien film but try something new with it. When they did try and have some form of possible set up for a conclusion regarding the police mans missing wife it all becomes pointless when he is made to shoot himself! There just wasn't a need to go into that back story at all. Another point about the policeman's retelling of said adduction is that she was taken from inside the house (front door was locked and that the key was on the inside if i recall correctly?) so why couldn't' the aliens just beam them up when the characters are hiding within the log house? The film breaks its own logic.

The ending was an insult as having both characters shot pretty much made the whole journey pointless. Nothing was achieved and as a viewer i felt cheated out of my time. Its an ending that a lot of recent horror films seem to be doing which i don't understand as it undermines the whole story!

Speaking of budget, the original 'Halloween' was made on a shoe string budget. John Carpenter went into that film just wanting to make a good scary film that will put the chills down his audience. He achieved this by creating a daunting atmosphere and great writing/direction.
You may argue that a alien film would need a higher budget so maybe look towards 'dark skies' as a comparable picture as its budget was very close to this. Same theme yet they created some good scares and was fun to watch.

I respect your opinion in that you enjoyed this film, we all have our tastes after all but just because a film is going to be light hearted does not mean the quality of the story telling should be any lighter.

You're absolutely right

And taking all that into consideration, I thought it was pretty good

In fact, it was better than I thought it would have been

This was awesome! I totally agree. I didn't think it was bad, I enjoyed it.

Nice rant. What you're saying though makes the rating pretty accurate though, it's not a great movie, it's not a horrible movie, it's just pretty decent which makes a 5 score about right. Don't worry about the critiques, nobody listens to those pretentious idiots anyway, let them go about analyzing everything they watch to the point where they can't enjoy anything.

Now, I have to disagree about it being an alien abduction movie though, it's not even really sci-fi. It's more of a standard horror movie where the standard type aliens are the bad guys. Honestly, for the first 30 minutes I was pretty bored, I almost turned it off, but once I got passed that it was okay. My biggest problem with it was that everything was so textbook. Every single thing was every bad horror movie ever combined with every single abduction story ever, and it got a little boring. But the ending redeemed it, so it turned out well enough.

Still though, I do in fact think that with 3 million dollars I could do better, if someone wanna give me 3 million I'll give it a shot. Think about it, just a little more creativity and this could have gone from being mediocre to pretty good. And I'll tell you how.

First of, drop a bunch of the standard horror movie crap at the beginning, drop the whole "bunch of dumb teens partying cliche", drop the whole thing about the cop too as that ended up going no where anyway. But if it was gonna be in there, we'd take him to the ship to and make him find his gf who had become this feral space woman by now. That way we could have had just the two main people to focus on from the start. I liked the guy with the weed farm, so as long as he didn't eat up to much of the 3 mill by being the most famous actor in this, we would keep him to. We would have used him a bit better though, for example, he could have had a more interesting story to tell instead of that standard conspiracy story. This way we could have gotten the whole first hour of the movie done in like 20-30 min, and make the rest of the movie be on the ship/space city, whatever that was. And there stuff could get a little crazy, now we're free to come up with whatever insane story we want, maybe the aliens use us for entertainment making us fight each other in a pit of leaches, then eat our dead in an after fight party or whatever. And of course the heroine and hero of the movie are trying to escape and stuff. Running around on the space thing, messing with tech they don't understand, finding out some more stuff about these aliens as they go along, tons of fun to be had here. Somewhere along the the way, somewhere towards the end they would have met the weed farm guy again, he's of course been a badass and is escaping to, but ends up sacrificing himself for the young couple who's in love and all sweet and *beep* Then, not by the mercy of the aliens, but through their own ingenuity and some dumb luck they get themselves back, and then the ending scene could have happened just the way it did.

Same actors, same cliche filled style, but without the boring useless bits and with more creativity and more entertainment value. I mean, 3 mill is a lot of money, and it's really not that hard to come up with stuff that is just supposed to be entertaining. Clearly it still wouldn't have won any awards or anything, but like you said, it was not meant to, it was just meant to be fun, and I think it would have been more fun like this.

Your right, it was fun, and the lead actress. Doll!
I nearly switched it off, but stuck with it, and was rewarded.