Lazy movie makes you feel cheated

Rating: 4/10 (4 April 2008)

A spaceship with various colorful characters crash-lands on an alien world full of monsters who come out in the dark and try to eat them. Lots of chasing and fighting ensues while tensions rise between a law-enforcement man, a criminal, Muslims on a pilgrimage, and a selfish pilot.
That's it for the plot. Being a visually exciting sci-fi action movie from Hollywood, you would expect to be entertained. And you are, but you end up feeling like you just had a very cheap one night-stand.
The elements of the story are all inferior copies (extreme dark planet cycles from Nightfall, monsters from Alien, dangerous but helpful outsider from Waterworld), there is never any feeling of an impressive imagination at work or that they sat down to work out the ideas. In other words, a copy-paste quick blockbuster.
Beware spoilers:
The writing is unforgivably lazy and terribly coincidental: They land on a huge planet right next to a previous colony, they land exactly at the end of a 22 year cycle, they crash land on a hard surface but survive, etc.
The monsters never make any sense: They are hyper-sensitive to light but pull a man off the surface in broad daylight, they evolve on a planet that is mostly light but can't stand any light, they have nothing to eat except each other, they fight each other when in flight but somehow live in claustrophobic caverns for years, they attack only the people that the writers want to get rid of, and they give birth to light-emitting babies?
And on a personal note, any movie that kills off Claudia Black early is simply stupid.