which gives away many of the "twists" in the movie. It showed way, way too much.

I liked it more than you, but yeah, the script is pretty messy. I thought the performances were fine and the direction in and of itself was good too...it was definitely screaming "SPIELBERG!" most of the time, but that's perfectly fine with me.

The first half had enough X-Files energy that I was kinda into that, and there are a couple scenes and shots that I just really enjoyed. For example, the move when O'Connor is crawling to the car, gets in, and the camera swings around from the back and then goes in the open passenger door, I loved that. On the flip side, the fact that O'Connor was crawling in broad daylight about 50-feet from dozens of agents who were looking for him was bonkers. My theater was crowded and there was plenty of murmuring like, "okay what is this dude doing? This is silly!"

On a binary scale I'd give it a thumbs up, but I acknowledge that's in large part because I like Spielberg and I like aliens. I understand all the negatives.

We actually liked it a lot, for the reasons you mentioned and I also think there was more going on under the surface (quite a bit of religous references), but I need to read more about it.