Viewers know that Niska is a good mother because she spends most of the movie trying to reunite with her daughter, whose mysterious Academy patrons are always presented (or gossiped about) as brainwashing villains, so their motives are always transparently evil and self-serving. We know exactly how we’re supposed to feel about the Academy based on an establishing scene where an anti-Academy swastika graffiti is neatly tagged: “Peacekeepers or occupiers?” We can also hear Goulet’s unqualified contempt for these straw men fascists in murky dialogue like “As long as we have one piece of land, they will always come for us.”
It’s only a matter of time before Victoria (Birva Pandya), a fellow Academy recruit, shows Waseese why you can’t even trust bad guys who sort of look like you. That’s a loaded and frankly patronizing concept given how little we know about Victoria beyond her identity as a person-of-color. But a scapegoat is inevitably needed to advance the movie’s tissue-thin plot, so a few supporting characters rise to the occasion. You probably already know who they are and that’s most of the problem.
So much of “Night Raiders” depends on at-a-glance assumptions that it’s often easy to nod along with its pat implications without ever really engaging with its loaded symbolism. We lurch from one toothless conflict to the next through a series of dreary chases and set pieces, most of which look and sound like they were assembled by the movie’s weary on-camera subjects. And while this sort of wan rebellion yarn seems to have been designed with a general audience in mind, there’s nothing here that’s so culturally specific or emotionally focused as to earn our emotional investment.
Niska and Waseese’s search for acceptance is especially frustrating given how generally sympathetic they often seem. It’s hard to imagine anybody—even misguided viewers who identify with the Jingos—feeling completely comfortable in a world where everybody looks, talks, and behaves the same way. But that’s exactly the sort of bleak cookie-cutter future that “Night Raiders” forecasts: heroes are good because they attack the right bad guys (mostly drones), and villains are bad because they are either too weak or too insensitive to fight the real enemy. I wanted to root for and care about the world of “Night Raiders,” but I never felt like Niska and her daughter said more about themselves than their predictable behavior advertised.
Now playing in theaters and available on digital platforms.
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