Amazingly overrated weak comedy or terrible drama?

Rating: 4/10 (2 February 2010)

If this movie was meant to be mostly humorous or silly, I give it a 4 out of 10. I did laugh a couple of times, but for most of it I was just smiling at the absurdity of it. If however, this was meant as a serious movie, then I would give it a 1. Please tell me it wasn't meant to be serious. Please tell me when I heard them say "human rights groups would be monitoring the evictions closely" that they actually said "nonhuman rights groups," because having a human rights group at the evictions of alien cockroaches makes as much sense as them being present at a whale hunt. If it was meant to be comedic, it is still pretty lazy in writing. Peta would have made more sense. But that's a sloppy line if I heard it right. If this movie was meant to be taken seriously it had many more problems. Such as the idea that the US and other countries would leave an alien ship and weapons in the hands of South Africa. Never. They could have written a few lines to explain it away well enough but they didn't bother. Or that any country would tolerate such obnoxious looking and behaving aliens on the doorstep. They would have been quarantined right at the beginning unless they were worried an alien ship would come back looking for them-a few lines would have explained it. The refugee scenario worked OK in Alien Nation because the aliens acted more human like and it was a cop drama anyway--but here, there wasn't much done in an effort to make such a scenario realistic. And the idea that one was supposed to feel sad for them--I am afraid the director didn't do a good job making me feel that way, and I avoid stepping on insects when I walk! I felt nothing for them. Spoiler: When the main character gets sprayed with goo and has a change, it was so clean and perfectly done that it reminded me of 1950s cartoons where someone drinks a potion and their head changes into a frog (while their hands stay normal). If this was serious, the guy's face would at least have had a rash! And the way they stick him in the gun for the test--it just made me smile. It was ludicrously presented. So i have to believe it was mostly meant as a comedy, but it didn't work for me. Also the use of shaky cam annoyed me, and the docudrama style was inconsistently used. I had heard it was like this generation's 2001, Robocop and Star Wars. Big praise. The movie borrowed a few elements from them but wasn't fun like those movies. The aliens spoke in a bizarre clicking fashion and the humans could perfectly understand it--in Star wars this was done in a comic book manner, and the Stormtroopers were wearing helmets that may well have had a translator device. That was cartoonish. The alien arm transformation was cartoonish. I know it was a bad summer for movies, but really, was this that much of a breath of fresh air? It only came about because the video game movie Jackson had planned was canceled-and they needed to do something with the money they had. It wasn't as if the director had a script about alien race relations sitting on a desk. And there was precious little about that in the movie. I cant remember one quotable line of dialogue. I keep coming back to it being a comedy--even the idea that Nigerians would prostitute themselves for the aliens as suggested in a line--hard to imagine. Seems more like they just threw everything they could at the screen and hope it stuck. Lucky for them they had the backing of a big studio and director. The effects were quite good though-I just wish they had used them in a better story.