Scavengers (2013)

This is a fairly low-budget sci-fi movie with nothing original to show, and it's not trying to be funny (which could potentially make it more entertaining), so there's only so much you can expect. 7/10 would be the maximum a movie of this kind could get.With that in mind, it's actually not too bad in general. There's just one problem.If you take all the characteristics of badly written villains from the 80s and put them together, you get Captain Jekel. His lines are retarded and ridiculous, and so is his behaviour. That, combined with crappy acting, makes this character a disaster and would be bad even for a toilet cleaner, never mind somebody who's supposed to be a captain of a space ship. Every second of the movie that this character is on screen is extremely annoying. If a person like that was really a captain, his ship would never even take off.That said, the rest of the movie is pretty decent. Acting for the other ship's crew is fine. Jekyl's crew's acting is mediocre, but not terrible. The CGI isn't great (looks more like from a game than a movie), but low-budget is low-budget. I'm not one of the people who watch movies for special effects, so I don't mind this at all, but if you're one of those, you'll probably complain. The plot's not original or anything, but I've seen worse.It's not a great movie, but it's not terrible either. Just try to get distracted with something else whenever you see Captain Jekel.

Oh, dear... where to begin. 'Scavengers' is a case of something trying to be more than it actually is. The special effects are pretty blatantly computer-generated which doesn't help, but, if it had a decent story or something, I'll wager that most science fiction fans could forgive it its shortcomings.Basically, you have a good ship and a bad ship, both vying for the same salvage in deep space. How do we know which ship is good and which ship is bad? Because both a equally as close to the precise definition of 'good' and 'evil' as you could get – making them both pretty clichéd. The 'good' ship has nice, attractive, kind people who live in a brightly-lit ship with white walls. The 'bad' spaceship is filled with creepy, Gothic-looking people who only want to kill people (and the walls of their ship are black and dimly-lit).The 'story' (for what it is) is just bouncing back from one ship to the other while they try to fight over the salvage (which is worth something... by the way). And it's not just the effects that are a bit shoddy. The script is pretty tired and the actors don't seem to have enough enthusiasm in them to lift the dialogue above its mediocre roots.It has a real 'made for TV' feel to it. It's not the worst movie ever made, but it's far from being the best. If you like you sci-fi a little sparse on the sets and effects department, watch Dr Who – it also has a story and reasonable actors.http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/

The idea for the movie did seem decent enough if not exactly original, and I was willing to forgive any shortcomings providing that it looked that effort was made. Unfortunately Scavengers or Space Soldiers didn't seem to show much if any effort. The best thing about it is the music, which was fitting and had a sense of dread but once the movie was over I couldn't remember any of it at all. So if that was it for a redeeming value, that doesn't say very much now, does it? Scavengers/Space Soldiers is made cheaply to the extent that it was a real eyesore to look at, with choppy editing, too darkly-lit and green-screen like sets and special effects that looked like they were made out of the least expensive plastic they could find. The writing sounds incredibly forced and inane, the worst of it even intelligence-insulting, I agree that the villains' cheesy nick-names are indication enough of how bad the writing is here. The story is plodding and predictable with nothing suspenseful, thrilling or fun. If any kind of heart went into making Scavengers/Space Soldiers I for one certainly didn't see it. The direction at best is amateurish, while the acting is just terrible. The actors do have truly bad dialogue and cardboard characters to work from, but I don't see that as much of an excuse to act miserable throughout. Sean Patrick Flanery over-compensates so badly that it was really embarrassing to watch him, if an actor who has shown before that he can be good can be bad as well that is also an indication of the quality of the acting. All in all, utterly wretched in almost every way possible excepting the music, considering even that asset wasn't that great either that is faint praise. I personally don't think it's the worst movie ever made or the worst I've ever seen, but it is one of the worst I've come across in a long time and probably the worst movie of 2013 I've seen so far. 1/10 Bethany Cox

You know a movie is bad when you wish Nicholas Cage was in it!The Good: My favourite part was when Breathtaker and Jekel kiss through the shower glass! Also "Twelve" aka "Thirteen" is eye-candy...even if he is the recurring red-shirt. I also give props to the writer for adding in "I'm not dead yet" in what I will consider a tribute to Monty Python. And if it sounds as though I'm grasping for straws, it's because I am.The Bad: Everything else. Weak plot, poorly written dialogue, bad sets, worse cgi. The "twist" at the end was disappointing. I hope to never hear the words "protocol" and "scavenger" again.