Good grief, calm down, some of you

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2009)

While this was a great _action/suspense_ movie placed in a sci-fi setting, this film hardly qualifies as excellent sci-fi. My guess is that most persons offering hyper-enthusiastic comments here are not consumers of sci-fi literature. A well-crafted sci-fi storyline should offer "swallowable" explanations for pivotal events, rather than treat the liberties offered by speculative fiction as an excuse to broad-brush science. An example of a major sci-fi snag in this story is asking the viewer to simply accept that an alien starship "fuel", when accidentally spilled on a human, causes that human to slowly and inexorably morph into an alien. Hunh?!? Absolutely NO mechanism for this key storyline event is offered. How could the writer conflate such an extremely complicated biological phenomena with a substance simply required to power an alien landing vehicle? Yet, there it is. As a sci-fi fan, I was bothered. I have a hard time believing a less distracting plot mechanism wasn't available to the writer. And, in general, I'm fair: as a sci-fi fan, I'm willing to accept an alien anti-grav device could hold a gigantic derelict mother craft in place for 20 years. I'll accept the possibility of 1+ million alien refugees being kept in internment on earth, without issues of contamination of alien microbes etc. I'll even accept that they really like cat food (although this notion is also filled with plot holes). But aside from some "Star Trek: Next Generation"-ish social commentary, and the well-presented/acted alien slum segments, I viewed the majority of this movie as not much more than a vehicle to deliver the Ooo-wow weaponry scenes like those from the last 15-20 minutes of the film. However, because I enjoyed these immensely (even the uneconomical head-exploding device used on the black-market king), and the excellent GCI renderings of the aliens (as well as their alien "language") I gave the movie a 7 of 10.