A misadventure of social sci-fi schlock

Rating: 2/10 (17 August 2009)

I just saw this film with five other sci-fi buffs on Friday Aug 14, 2009. We all had the same opinion: Wildly overrated, absurd plot, over-the-top political PC message that gets garbled with the underlying and ultimately unimportant alien sci-fi plot line, and finally an overreaching script and director that focuses on short-term shock value and FX rather than the need to integrate plot lines in a new and innovative manner. So many scenes and concepts "borrowed" directly from other movies (space ship shots straight from Independence Day; transformation scenes from The Fly; vivisection footage from more than one Nazi war movie; robotics right from Transformers; building raids from Bourne Identity), etc.
The plot holes are huge: Alien weaponry that the aliens just don't want to use unless necessary? Aliens stranded in space except for one smart one...and why didn't that alien do something? Then why were there so many weapons on the ship in the first place? The unnecessarily inhuman treatment of the aliens in such an extreme way as to not make any sense whatsoever. The absurdity of the government's relocation asking the aliens to sign papers? I mean who thinks up this out-of-context ridiculousness? The entire weapons angle screamed of stereotyped 1984-think as though Neanderthals were in charge of everything and the unnecessary scene where the protagonist shoots an alien with one of their weapons (as though he should complain much) is there only, again, for the shock value.
Sorry, I can't give this movie points just for trying to shove a bunch of apartheid PC points down my throat in an incoherent and unconnected manner. Never did the movie highlight a coherent point of view or give any socio-economic insights as to the relationship between humans and the aliens that would provide adequate underpinnings for justifying their horrible over-the-top prejudicial treatment.