Such easily preventable mistakes...

Spoilers ensue. Not that there's much to spoil, folks.

The movie is low-budget. So what? That's really not what makes it bad, as I've seen some really good stuff with equally bad special effects and even worse acting. I don't even care that this rips off its backstory from Terminator: Judgement Day and then steals heaping helpings of Dune's breeding program, Blake's 7's mutiny, and Star Wars' Emperor, along with Foundation's Galactic Empire. Everything steals from something. Do it subtly and you've still got something.

This was just a case of bad movie making.

First of all, there's that horribly indistinct opening narration. If the Overseer isn't taking center stage, he isn't needed there. Better to focus on your lead to give him a more understandable motivation for the mutiny. In fact, nothing of the backstory is necessary in this movie. All you need to know is contained in the words "evil Federation".

Then there's poor environment. It's unnecessary to have both the Terra Nostra and the Federation in the script. If you're going to have two empires, you need to make them visually and morally distinct. Here we have a nasty Federation vs a nasty Terra Nostra. They look and act the same. It's damned near impossible to tell the two apart here, so having them both is merely confusing, and a mistake. The Big Reveal doesn't make it any better... it just makes the whole thing completely pointless.

There's poor art direction. There is very little to differentiate scenes. A scene shot on Earth looks identical to one shot in a hold, or on a space station. The audience is left to wonder what the hell they're looking at, even when they know who. And they don't know who they're looking at until well into the show, IF they stick around that long.

There's poor use of music. Music in a movie is there for a purpose. Proper use of themes not only influence the audience's emotions, but they help to identify locales, differentiate the good guys from the bad guys. Here, the same dreary tuneless ambience (when used) crosses all these boundaries and is pretty much useless. What music there is isn't terrible... it's just wasted.

There's poor characterization. What negotiator kills off his hostage the moment the other party agrees to give him what he wants? Just plain stupid.

It's not all horrible. The space battle scenes aren't altogether terrible, and neither is the street fighting in urban Terra Nostra. The biggest problem is technical... in any live action scene where there's a hint of SFX, the camera is locked down, and that just destroys the illusion. A bit more shakey cam is demanded. The actors are acting... basically delivering what they need to. As I mentioned, I've seen worse acting in better movies (such as William Hurt in SyFy's Dune, or John Malkovich in anything at all).

The good news is, food service still works. Everything else about this movie is pretty much broken, and that's really attributable to the guy in the director's chair.