Disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (16 September 2009)

That is the best word for my experience with this film: disappointing. I wanted to like this film, I really did. I thought I would. All of the hype around it seemed, for the first time in a while, as though it was worth it. As though it was deserved. I am sad to say I was wrong. What I thought would be a brilliantly conceived piece of cinema epic in scope and just reveling in gritty realism, turned out to be just another summer action flick, that was more concerned with its CGI than the issues it raised.
The premise from the trailers seemed interesting. The aliens had technology we wanted but couldn't operate, and we were somehow keeping this advanced race prisoner on our own planet, causing god knows how many issues for both ourselves and them all for the sake of a military advantage. And for all I know, all of that could still have been taking place in this world. Only problem is we never saw it happening. There were only a few times throughout the film that the story seemed to intersect this premise, and none of them were at all satisfying.
The film starts as a mock documentary, giving us the necessary information so we can grasp what we'll be seeing for the next hour and a half. This, I will concede, was brilliant. I thoroughly enjoyed the first half hour of this film. The gritty realism was there, it seemed as though it would be raising some serious issues, and it had a delightfully macabre atmosphere and feel to it. Then, for no reason or warning at all, we are thrust into a cinematic film, rather than a documentary.
It was an odd, unexpected, and shocking change of pace. I think it would have worked very well if they'd kept it there. But instead, they insist on interweaving their documentary feel between the cinematic portions. I believe this was done in an attempt to give different feels to the two stories. All it accomplished though was to constantly force you to watch the film differently every ten minutes. And when the two stories finally became one, the documentary feel didn't go away. Making the character study portion of this film hard to stomach. There's no point in studying a character we don't care about and feel detached from, thanks to the documentary feel established earlier.
Which brings me to another flaw of this film that made it difficult to watch. It never really decided what it was about. In the beginning, it was about an alien race that had landed here 28 years ago and hadn't left. This portion was most enjoyable, as it gave us a good window into this alternate world, and showed the fallout of this tremendous event. Then the film became a sort of horror/thriller as it became more focused on the story, the mysterious substance, and the mortifying transformations it was causing in Wilkus van de Merwe. This was still interesting, but definitely not as much as the feel before. And Wilkus mutating into a prawn seemed like it was a story element straight out of Paul W. S. Anderson's "Resident Evil" films.
From here, the story finally thought it might become a little more epic. Wilkus and Christopher, neither of which I really cared for, decided they would try to break into this top secret lab, steal the fuel back, and make a break for the mother ship. Betrayals and surprises were abound, but I didn't care about any of them. Mostly because I couldn't care about the characters, feeling too detached from them after the documentary style introduction to them. During this portion, the film was half action flick, half character study of Christopher. Both seemed out of place, but the second one especially. Once again, what is the point of studying a character we have no stake in? After that the film just descended into action. It actually managed to maintain its cinematic feel for about forty five minutes while all this was going on. Then, suddenly, we're back to people being interviewed and it closed as some kind of feel good documentary about Christopher's possible return and the unknown fate of Wilkus. All the while managing to avoid actually doing anything about all of the issues it raised. So instead of an intellectual, gritty, and twisted sci-fi experience, we were given some kind of half thrown together action movie that pretended to be smarter than it was. In essence, the film could have been far more cerebral than it was. The fact that it wasn't was the biggest disappointment of all for me.
All in all, I give the film a 6.5. It had some good moments, but the story was bogged down by the relentless use of documentary inserts (sans the forty five minutes previously stated) that were a good excuse to slip in any information we would need to understand the upcoming scene, but ultimately made the film feel too detached for the less than epic story it was telling.