A good movie! I was worried it was going to go the art house/indie route and be confusing and while pretty to watch, not give the viewer any real answers. It did give answers, in fact pretty much everything is answered right at one of the best endings of any science fiction movie I have seen in some time.
The movie starts off - having seen the trailers - as a completely different movie almost. We meet three friends traveling across country, friend Jonah and hacker friend Nic along with Nic's girlfriend Haley, all helping Haley move from MIT to a university in California. Johah and Nic are obsessed with a powerful and cryptic hacker called Nomad, who they track down to a very, very rural area of Nevada. More or less along the route they take, the three end up investigating, hoping to confront Nomad in person.
Until they reach the place where their GPS coordinates lead them to Nomad, the film (a few creepy overtones of the hacker skills of Nomad aside), feels like a beautiful shot indie film, with gorgeous light, beautiful skies, a long road trip through farmland and forest and desert, the three of them dealing (or not dealing) with Haley leaving their lives for a year and Nic coming to terms with an illness that in the future will put him possibly in a wheel chair and how he views that changing (or ending) his relationship with Haley.
Once they get to the strange home in the desert where Nomad supposedly lives, it gets a bit of a horror movie vibe, with lowlight cameras revealing a strange house, cryptic house hold items, but no sign of Nomad. Quickly things get worse, as Nic and Jonah, in the basement (!; not a place I want to be in a such setting), hear Haley screaming...and it gets strange from there, with Nic waking up in some sort of secure government facility, surrounded by people in contamination suits, the only one that talks to Nic being Jonah (with a wonderful calm and soothing voice).
I don't want to give anything more away, but it was a good and original science fiction film. I liked the flashbacks to the life Nic had before the events of this film, the time before the encounter grounded the characters (though not entirely sure the trajectory of Nic's and Haley's relationship really played out post encounter), and the effects (especially the slow motion photography) were good.