MyOpinionIsFact

This movie is a low budget flick without many worthwhile qualities. Everything about the movie is mediocre at best: the script, the acting, the directing, the music, and so on. The adult actors all hover at around run-of-the-mill level. The child actors go from not good to terrible. At times the acting is so cringe-worthily bad that even the most patient of us will think to turn it off. The script is really odd with a slowly-paced storytelling punctuated with unconvincing developments and silly training montages. This all comes to a predictable and ridiculously optimistic ending that not only misses the chance for a non-Hollywood story arc but takes the standard formula and makes it even more of a happy ending than usual in a Hollywood movie. I've seen truly awful movies and this isn't that bad but it's down there.

This episode is really boring. The whole "extra dimensional" aspect of the story is beyond science fiction and into science stupidity. On top of that they layer an extremely cheesy love story. Wouldn't be so bad if the male lover's acting weren't so terribly unrealistic. Someone in the writing staff of ds9 has the idea romance and seduction occur when a man stares creepily at a woman in awkward silence. It's atrociously shallow and silly. There's a "filler" subplot involving an alien trying to get a holosuite program of Major Kira. It's stretched-out too long but it builds to a funny, if cheap, laugh. Overall this episode has been one of the weakest in the ds9 series until this point. Totally forgettable.

I managed to sit all the way through this bargain-bin schlock only because watching clips of martial art movies provides a minimum level of entertainment. The animated framing device and the annoying, "Yahoo web clip"-sounding voice narration that link the clips together provided virtually no insight into history of kung fu movies. The intellectual level of the narrated "analysis" is about on par with a thesis-lacking essay from a below average student in high school. The historical analysis presented amounted to basically just putting a random movie on screen and mentioning who starred in it. Attempts at linking films together to provide a sense of historical development were largely absent and completely inept when present. The film might have worked better if it stayed in strictly chronological order but it jumps back-n-forth in time so much that it leaves the viewer confused. The film is shapeless and shallow. The writers seem to only have had a superficial understanding of subject matter and it just seems like a couple of kung fu geeks somehow managed to convince somebody to fund this. In this end, this is a movie built to ride of the coat-tails of the films it covers. Given the history of exploitation of kung fu stars (something mentioned in the film) makes this rather ironic.