Good, not great.
Admittedly, I had rather high hopes going in, believing it might be the following in a blender: Close Encounters, E.T., Starman, Firestarter, Signs, and Super 8. (In retrospect, these are high hopes indeed, are they not [?!], and probably unattainable by Spielberg working yet again with J.J. Abrams.)
Spoiler Alert:
It's very Starman, yes, with a Close Encounters finish, but ultimately it fails to lift off.
It's too quiet, too sluggish, too bare. And I am NOT an action hog; I love quiet, slow, empty. But this was too little, even for me.
With more present background music (something to buoy us along), fuller character development (these are intriguing characters; tell us more!), and a morsel to go on (flashbacks, motivations, something), this coulda been totally workable, but as it is—one is left feeling slightly marooned.
I cared, but with 3 dimensions, I could have cared a lot.
The first and final ten minutes were my favorite, though Lauren said she enjoyed "the first hour and twenty minutes, but not the end," so that's film consumption for ya: one man's trash is another man's treasure, and no two palates are precisely the same.
If you enjoy quiet, ruminative, melancholy sci-fi that is primarily silent passengers on a road-trip to destination unknown, well, I think you'll enjoy this quite a lot.
But otherwise, maybe it's a pass, if only because you'll be kinda bored.
Postscript: I have downloaded the score, sparse as it was, because it's very Terrence Malick meets Michael Mann meets M83. So, there's that, which is pretty dang cool, and well worth nine dollars in and of itself.
