Night Raiders

I believe this is the first movie I've seen recently which is slyly conservative. First the excessive rules and punishment's for silly things like ID. Then the idea that white female liberals view natives as victims that need to be saved. Then of course the Canadian catholic schools concept where the child is indoctrinated. Good to know North American Natives aren't as naïve as everyone else.

Night Raiders starts promising with an intriguing plot but towards the second part of the movie the quality is just tumbling down. It looks like towards the end the writers had a lack of imagination, or were just too lazy to give it a better outcome. So overal I was entertained for a bit more than half of the movie, after that I got bored. The acting is average, some were better than others. Nothing award winning that's for sure. It's too bad because Night Raiders definitely could have been better, the ingredients were there but the execution failed.

The feminist and culturally specific Indigenous focal point in writer and director Danis Goulet's feature debut is admirable, but is muddled, dull and falls short in her attempt to intertwine a dystopian apocalyptic sci-fi story within it. It started off really interesting and engaging as a apocalyptic sci-fi, but then once the cultural aspect became evident, I quickly lost interest and got bored, right up to the last 5 minutes of the ending. The 101 min runtime felt much longer with the slow pacing. The cinematography was excellent, the directing decent, and the performances quite good. It's a 6/10 from me.

Yes, I know this film is a bit lo-fi, yet the acting leads are superb, the story a bit too believable--especially in terms of recently uncovered nightmares of Indian schools, and the malicious tech right on target. Was there a bit too much left from he editing room intact: YES. But some of these actors probably worked their whole lives to get into a wide-distribution release. I appreciated the film on many levels and would hope other viewers would as well.

I give it 3 starts because it starts out ok, and visually it has a sort of a gritty look thats a bit like a chick centric version of Children of Men. Unfortunately, that's about the high point. It descends from there in boring, talky moments, flails around with some rather hokey seeming 'tribal' stuff, and then ends with the stupidest and most illogical twist possible. The only people rating this over say, 5, are only doing so because they are invested in the production for reasons other than film quality.

A truly compelling story of a future gone mad with comparrisons with what, we as a nation, experienced in the past. The film is very reminicsent of what Indigenious peoples experienced in residential schools.