A movie with great potential and some fruit for thoughts

Rating: 8/10 (2 November 2017)

It is a movie with great potential. Unfortunately, I felt that too much effort was put on making it action-packed, rather than developing the characters and the story line. The worst thing is the action part itself is really not that convincing, and certainly filled with predictable cliché. The almost chaotic action scenes also significantly diluted the intensity of the plot.
The strong point of the movie is really on the metaphorical level. The aliens are metaphor of refugees or lower class labour imported from another country. Depicted in a particularly vulgar manner, they are often viewed as such by the hosting populace. The film even pointed out that the aliens supposedly belong to lower class of their planet. They were stranded and the government did only the minimum to keep them alive, resulting their appalling state of being, which feeds back into the stereotype of them being vulgar and inferior, despite clear evidence that they came from a far more technological advanced civilisation. The superiority is really built upon the situational conditions and artificial construct of the society, yet the majority is too blind to see and cares too less change.
The lead character works for an organisation that created and sustained the said sub-optimal treatment of the aliens; he himself showed very little goodwill in actually helping them. Yet in the end, he really relies on the goodwill of the alien to honour its promise and come back to convert him back to human. It would have been rather interesting if there was more bonding between the human and the alien main characters, but perhaps that was the whole point: when the roles exchange- and it can happen very quickly- there will be little chance to redeem the past. Indeed, when the lead alien character finally brought the whole army from another galaxy to rescue its fellow specie, human would be at their mercy.