boe_dye sez: pseudo-intellectual drivel with more plot holes then chicken wire

Rating: 1/10 (25 August 2009)

I honestly went to this hoping to see something moderately original. And even if it wasn't original (which by the way, it really wasn't) at the very least something that would make me go "huh, interesting" not waiting till the end of the credits for punchline that never comes.
Within ten minutes of this documentary style film I was already wanting to leave. The pointless ramblings and the ridiculous plot holes are what really lost me. I suppose you could say that it was the "bigger picture", the apparent commentary on race relations that is what made this film. But even in that, if you have too many unanswered questions in a story, at least to a person who goes to the movies more often then not for a good story, then the message becomes lost.
We are meant to believe that this obviously advance race, just showed up on sunny afternoon, hovered over Johannesburg for a couple of days, only to be "liberated" by the altruistic humans, only to be "forced" into concentration camps for 20 years, while they scavenge for non-human alien parts, in order to return to their ship, so that they can go home and this whole time, while they not only have numbers and tech that could level the human race in a matter of months, they are doing nothing but hanging out in concentration camps and selling their incredibly advance weaponry (which only they can use due to genetic encoding), that is apparently illegal to have anyways according to the local government who are hosting these visitors as refugees, but they have it anyways, to the local gangs...
...For cat food...
That's about as stupid as saying that the Jews wanted to be captured and tortured and then finally liberated during the holocaust cause they had nothing else better to do for the weekend...
And then the subplot, or I suppose the plot of the social worker who get's a dose of his own prejudicial medicine by becoming the thing that he initially hates whom in the end he looks to as brother...
A movie for pseudo-intellectuals who can look over the apparent questions and only look at the race/prejudice issue, and get meaning out of this. Completely stupid, utterly a waste, and not a shred of intellectualism in it what so ever.
It's a scathing review because I myself am somewhat angered that I was suckered into this. However, PT Barnum speaks to me from the grave and reminds me that a sucker is born every minute.
Oh, and for all of you out there thinking that this is so original and edgy and never been done before, it has. It was done in an episode of the Outer Limits Entitled "The Grell". It came out ten years ago. Only difference is that the budget was considerably lower, and the story only needed about 45 minutes to the get the point across, and not nearly 2.5 hours...
However, It's not entirely fair to say that it's unoriginal because the Outer Limits has nearly covered just about every subject imaginable... But there it is. Technically speaking Babylon 5 did it with the Narn and the Centari, and so did Battlefield Earth, and even that was better then this...