This looks like it would be a tense sci-fi movie about invading aliens and the plucky humans who rebel against them. But it's not, not really. The premise is solid (see first half of first sentence), but the execution is lacking. There are far too many characters, which means not much time spent on any one of them, and there are so many different threads that the viewer quickly gets lost in trying to track everyone. John Goodman plays a police commissioner trying to quell the rebellion on behalf of our new alien overlords, known as the Legislators, who have taken over the planet. A plot was hatched against them but failed, with the perpetrators believed to have perished in the attempt. Goodman's William Mulligan isn't so sure. But the overarching problem with the movie is that it never allows the viewer to really become invested in anyone's cause, whether it's the captive humans or those collaborating with the mean ol' aliens. And, for a sci-fi movie, there really isn't much action to speak of. The rare action scenes are Earthling based; heck, we hardly ever see the invaders themselves (it's okay; this is a treatise of man turning on man, with the aliens kind of secondary characters at best). The result is that the movie feels disjointed, distant, and pointless, and the direction is so haphazard and muddled that it's difficult to really get a sense of what's happening and what it all means, even in the mild context of the movie itself. Because of the deficiencies of the script and the direction, watching this movie was a tedious experience.
Review of Captive State
