The background behind this film is a shoe string budget, some real fans of the genre and a writer who is well respected in the realms of fantasy literature. So with that in mind to compare this CGI film with the best of Pixar or Avatar would be unfair as it was never going to have the same "wow" factor.
For the uninitiated it is the 41st century and the human galactic empire is at war. Humanity's front line of defence is the space marines. Genetically enhanced super soldiers utterly loyal to the emperor encased in powered armour suits with very big guns.
This is the problem because while the movie looked better than I expected the whole (rather short) film revolves around a platoon of these humourless, quasi-religious soldiers going on a very linear mission. The script may not even be 60 pages long, nobody talks in anything other than short sentences and there are far more lines like "For the Emperor!" than anything approaching character development/banter and while that's fine for action scenes, as a film it makes the whole thing seem hollow.
The action is perfectly acceptable but nothing special and the whole feel of the movie is like a group going into a haunted house and are picked of one-by-one. The fact it is CGI allows some impressive vistas, a very large mother ship and some spooky supernatural going on but while every penny is on screen, you never really care about any of the protagonists so more time should have been spent on the basics- story, characters and dialogue and little less on the tech.
For the uninitiated it is the 41st century and the human galactic empire is at war. Humanity's front line of defence is the space marines. Genetically enhanced super soldiers utterly loyal to the emperor encased in powered armour suits with very big guns.
This is the problem because while the movie looked better than I expected the whole (rather short) film revolves around a platoon of these humourless, quasi-religious soldiers going on a very linear mission. The script may not even be 60 pages long, nobody talks in anything other than short sentences and there are far more lines like "For the Emperor!" than anything approaching character development/banter and while that's fine for action scenes, as a film it makes the whole thing seem hollow.
The action is perfectly acceptable but nothing special and the whole feel of the movie is like a group going into a haunted house and are picked of one-by-one. The fact it is CGI allows some impressive vistas, a very large mother ship and some spooky supernatural going on but while every penny is on screen, you never really care about any of the protagonists so more time should have been spent on the basics- story, characters and dialogue and little less on the tech.