Well filmed, but too dark

Rating: 4/10 (2 January 2010)

The previews I saw were vague so I had little expectation and got the DVD based on general "good" reviews. The movie was certainly filmed well. It uses a documentary style, but a very professional and cleanly filmed documentary, not like the Blair Witch style. On-the-scene footage mixes with interviews and clips of security footage to set the background and then real time scenes move the story forward with no relation to the documentary. Subtitles are a necessity, I hope the theatrical version added them where needed. The aliens might be entirely CGI, or maybe a mixture of CGI and puppetry, but they were excellently rendered. The technology is finally up to interaction with real actors. So there are several aspects that deserve the good reviews.
My low review score is based on the fact I had to stop a little more than an hour in because the story was just too dark. Almost every human in it was crudely and casually violent, cruel, and uncaring, both to the "prawns" and other humans. It was a cast of near psychopaths. I don't need a happy movie, and I certainly expected violence and prejudice based on the film's description, but it was so unfeeling as to be unbelievable for me. Yes there's cruelty and torture in the world and apathy, especially from a distance, but my town doesn't get together to run crazy experiments, riot, murder and eat our foreign neighbors simply because they're different, and bug-like aliens or not these were clearly sentient beings so that's the parallel. I would have preferred more subtle discrimination with perhaps a few scenes of cruelty to show what humanity is capable of. The Johannasburg citizens are a part of the developed world, it could have been Paris or Washington or Shanghai. And scenes that reminded me of the Rwandan genocide descriptions were plopped right downtown. The evil corporation and mercenaries were too much for me. Just be aware of the tone before viewing.