Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Brilliant and touching

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

On a distant planet the human overlords are slowly wiping out the indigenous species known as Arids in order to take the planet's raw materials. If it sounds like "Avatar", wait. Griffin (Julian Sands) is the evil human viceroy over the planet which he runs like the Roman Empire.Moss (Angus Macfadyen )is a rebel that Griffin is hunting and wants to kill. Through a series of events a human named Hirokin (Wes Bentley) winds up in Moss' s camp. Moss knows the old "Way" which is like an oriental earth religion, plus martial arts. He instructs Hirokin in "The Way" so he can unite the tribes and defeat the humans. "The Way" also allows one to see the outcome of their decision before it happens.The humans have great advances like hover crafts, but fight with swords and spears. It is difficult to tell humans from Arids except by the lines on their hands. They can interbreed, but unfortunately the genocide has caused most of the Arid women to become barren.To add to the mix there are some woman/breeding/jealousy issues between Griffin, Hirokin, Griffin's barren girlfriend Orange(Jessica Szohr) Hirokin's fertile wife Terra (Mercedes Manning) and Moss's daughter Maren (Laura Ramsey).The acting and dialogue was fairly bad. They could have interjected some humor from time to time...like "These 2 Arids walk into a bar for the first time and say, "I'll have the usual..."No f-bombs, sex, nudity. Rape? Woman showers with her clothes on. PG sex talk "submit"

I gave this movie a bit more points than I was planning to because it was a low budget indie production. And I wouldn't have noticed it. So my respect for filming it to look like a normal Hollywood expensive movie. But I took points off for things that don't matter if it is a low or high budget movie. It was just so boring. Out of fight scenes I liked only one, the one where he tries to save his wife in a battle against other captured. That was the only one where it was exciting. The rest was boring.Wes Bentley is really good in the character. But there isn't much going on with the plot to keep ht viewer captured.

...this is the first of three films I've watched recently that look great, but don't have much else going for it. The story involves our man Hirokin, who is a human that lives on a planet that looks like Earth, who gets involved in a rebellion against the oppressive human regime. In the desert.Our aliens look remarkably like humans (one even has a Scottish accent) and are led by Agnus McFadyen. Hirokin is the chosen one and blah blah you've heard this thousands of times.Bad stuff: Far too many over-emotional scenes of people standing around while the music swells, which is all fine if something was going in between these scenes, but there's a lack of action here. So if, like me, you were waiting for Hirokin to man up and starts slashing hordes of bad guys, you're in for disappointment. Hirokin is in fact a bit of a knob.I couldn't care about anyone in this film. It looked really good though. More action, less arsing around talking philosophy.

Hirokin did have a good idea going for it, unfortunately it now joins the already quite big pile of movies that badly executed their good ideas. The best thing about it is some exotic scenery, but that's it. And even then you can't really enjoy it because the camera work and editing is so lazy and amateurish. The special effects are also rather unfinished looking and like they were shoe-horned in pretty much last minute, and the choreography and fight scenes have no energy or momentum, just clumsily done all round. The music is at best generic, it can be annoying also and it doesn't sound as though it entirely fits with everything else. Hearing the dialogue, I got the impression that the writers didn't bother to make sure that what they wrote actually made any kind of sense, it just rambles on, sounds awkward and often doesn't seem to really mean anything. The story aside from being highly derivative is dull, lacking in any thrills or fun and so predictable to the extent that you are constantly correctly guessing what happens next. There is nothing interesting or likable about the characters here, they are little more than severely underwritten archetypes, especially the villains that are among the most laughable of any movie. The acting is terrible especially the bland and wholly unheroic lead(he has the looks but not the acting chops), even Julian Sands, most likely the most well-known actor in the cast, manages to give a flat and really quite insipid performance. Angus Macfadyen likewise. Overall, Hirokin did have good potential that is wasted by really bad execution. Not the worst I've ever seen, but you'd be hard pressed to find anything redeeming regarding the movie. 1/10 Bethany Cox