Ang Misyon: A Marawi Siege Story was apparently made by people

...and that's surprising, because for a moment there I thought most of the cast was replaced by robots.

The Battle of Marawi was a costly and devastating conflict that took the lives of many brave soldiers and civilians. It's a rich source of conceptual material, especially for a film that aims to shine a spotlight on the many acts of heroism and valor that both soldiers and common people have done for the service of their country and home. In that respect, Ang Misyon: A Marawi Siege Story is borne from good intentions.

However, good intentions are often not enough. It doesn't exactly show us a tale of heroism in the midst of battle - instead, it shows us the life of a terrorist sympathizer whose motivations are left ambiguous to the very end.

Sajid (Martin Escudero) is a nurse who works in a hospital that tends to wounded soldiers. He encounters a wounded soldier and the two engage in a conversation that feels more like the scriptwriter talking to himself rather than realistic dialogue between two human beings. After a few vague flashbacks, it turns out that Sajid's father was killed by (((someone))), and that leads him to take up a position with an ISIS-linked group. He isn't even secretive about it; his room is filled with books that scream "ISIS" and he watches training and propaganda videos out in the open. Excuse me if I can't see the heroism in this tale at all. It tries to explain the roots of extremism, but does so poorly.

Putting that aside, the rest of the movie is pretty garbage. The characters in this movie don't act like human beings, and 90% of the actors in this movie have the acting range of a cardboard cutout. The film feels preachy and didactic. A woman is given an engagement ring in one scene (curiously, her fiancee to be doesn't even open the ring box, he shoves the unopened box in her direction), and with the bluntest affect and delivery ever, she states that she is surprised. There are tears in her eyes but that's obviously visine or something the staff dropped in her eyes to simulate the act of crying, probably because robotic technology hasn't advanced to the point of artificial tear ducts yet. Add the fact that after giving his fiancee the ring, the man talks about how much debt he had to accrue to acquire the ring, which is the most romantic thing ever.

In another scene, a man dictates the five pillars of Islam (probably from Wikipedia) to his son, who has been Muslim since birth. Our heroic protagonist (who is married) is shown to be flirting with a coworker, for no other reason than to have an extra character during a later dramatic scene. Martin Escudero tries his best to mimic a regional accent, but it doesn't work if the rest of his co-actors speak straight Tagalog. The filmmakers have obviously hired a number of non-actors in this film, and they are terribly directed, often looking like they are reading off cue cards. As for the rest of the movie, the music is bizarrely jarring, the editing feels too stretched out, and the action scenes in this film are poorly staged, tepid and boring.

As a Muslim, I don't know if I should be offended or not. At least the film's intentions were good... I hope. What's sad is that at the end of the film there is genuinely good footage of the men and women who protected our country during the siege. I would have loved a story about that, but unfortunately that film is not this one.

Ang Misyon: A Marawi Siege story is a horror story about the dangers of deforestation. Because if you have this much wood in the actors' performances, a lot of trees have presumably died for that, and that's a problem.