The first half of this movie, a mockumentary with big dollops of social satire on the side, is excellent. I also liked the body horror elements, which worked extremely well. My hope was that our protagonist would slowly realise the suffering of the "prawn" who hurt just as much as humans, but would be ultimately powerless to stop the banality of evil. Instead, the film becomes reliant on stock devices and overused action tropes. The most appalling was the absurd General Ripper Colonel, a character who was such a two dimensional asshole, it was numbingly obviously that he was going to end up with a spectacular karmic death. That's why I didn't really care when he did. The film did its action extremely well, and even with a comparatively tiny budget, this film somehow managed to make mecha fighting that far surpasses that of Transformers. But saying that, the action just seemed out of place in the context of the movie.

The problem was that the movie proposed a simple solution to save all the aliens in one go, which jarred with the anti-apartheid theme. There was no easy escape from real life apartheid, so I found this ending bittersweet. Ultimately, I wanted there to be a downer ending which more accurately reflected the hopelessness of it all, like in the apartheid in novel A dry White Season, and not some "happy" ending with heroes rising for freedom and slaughtering all the evil baddies like Braveheart.