Why this film suffered so badly...
The simple:
It suffered from the cutting of the entire traitor subplot. they need to restore the lost footage in a dvd re-release.
The Movie didnt just suffer cause of that.
It suffered because of the producer Todd Moyer who severely screwed up everything, be it the Kilrathi or jsut being generally uninterested in the movie, you could say he was jsut in it to make money. Hes an idiot and knows nothing about filming.
So after the Kilrathi failed so horribly Chris Roberts wanted to re-do them via VFX, 80% of the VFX in the movie was made by his Game Company Digital Anvil anyways. However he needed more money for that but FOX refused to give it anymore money as they didnt care anyways.
They would make money either way due to all the TV Deals and so on, however giving Roberts more money could kill the profit if the movie plummeted.
The other thing is that they gave the movie barely 3 months in pre-production.
Fox wanted to release it early on because of Star Wars Episode 1 coming out, so they cut the time.
Normaly you have 6 months, by todays standards its even longer.
Thats why the movie suffered so badly.