Awful movie and I am disappointed

Rating: 2/10 (23 October 2009)

This movie sounded good in theory. It sounded good in reviews. I love science fiction so the idea of aliens being stranded on earth and forced to live in ghettos seemed very interesting. I used to love the movie and television series Alien Nation, which had a similar theme. I was pumped and excited to see this movie. Sadly, it left the regular theater here before I got to see it so I had to wait for it to come to the $1.99 theater. At least that is good news because I only wasted $1.99 (and the required $9 for popcorn and a drink...).
What is good? The special effects are very good and the action sequences are well done. I dislike an action sequence with too many fast cuts or too many close up shots of the hero or villain. While this had a very little of both, overall the sequences were filmed from the vantage point I would want to see. The basic plot was also good and interesting. The CGI work on the aliens was very good and they seemed more like actual characters than just cartoons.
What is not so good? First and foremost, the accents. I realize this was supposed to be South Africa and it would be silly to have them speaking American English but the idioms and fast speaking was almost unintelligible at times. A few idioms were easy enough to figure out but many meant nothing to me. I think the acting was probably pretty good but it is hard to say since I did not understand a lot of what was being said. I know, that is how things are in a foreign film but this was not supposed to be a foreign film and difficult to understand English (at least to an American) is why I do not see foreign films. It was extremely distracting. I also did not expect that all aliens would be unable to speak English so I would have to read a lot of subtitles. I can believe that humans and aliens would learn one another languages even if they did not speak each others but most of the humans seemed to be awfully capable of understanding the aliens and when I figure that we humans have a lot of trouble understanding one another's language (or even the language of other English speakers), I just feel like that level of understanding was a bit too much. Yeah, complaining of linguistics in a movie with space aliens sounds odd but that is what I thought.
This is definitely a movie I would have preferred to wait for the DVD version. First, I would have had subtitles to be sure I understand all that was being said and second, I would have saved a lot of money on just renting it. As it is, I would definitely not recommend this movie.