Brooklyn Letexier-Hart

(On Cable TV, April 2022) This isn’t a fun review to write. Canadian film reviewers have their marching orders: First Nations films are to be lauded. First Nations films taking aim at past trauma inflicted by the colonizers are terrific. And First Nation Science-Fiction movies using extrapolation to confront those issues? Can’t think of a better thing! But despite our best intentions, the movies themselves have to work… and Night Raiders doesn’t. Lazily propping up a drone-fuelled dystopian future in which our brave protagonists (mostly First Nations) are chased, pursued, oppressed, killed, tortured, demeaned and disrespected by totalitarian oppressors (mostly Caucasian), it’s a film that scarcely goes beyond blunt-force obviousness. There’s something very cool about a Canadian/New Zealand co-production exploring matters of systemic oppression and setting it into a dystopian future, but I expected more than the same contrived clichés half-heartedly executed. It’s not as if the film doesn’t have its assets – I quite liked Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Brooklyn Letexier-Hart in the lead roles, and writer-director Danis Goulet occasionally gets a great moment or two – by the time the film works itself to a climax in which drones are manipulated like birds, there’s a fusion of themes, symbolism and science-fiction devices that should have been the bare minimum for such a film. Alas, the way getting there is long, repetitive and often obnoxious in its lack of nuance. Good people are good people because of their ethnicity, and evil white people could not possibly be worse if they tried. In many ways, Night Raiders seems to be muttering to itself in YA tropes and in doing so doesn’t do the work required to reach anyone who’s not already sympathetic to its goals. It’s even more frustrating considering that, in some ways, it gets halfway to its destination – but the missing half is significant enough to limit the film’s effectiveness, even for those reviewers who would like nothing more than to give it a recommendation.