Sorry to say, but this movie is very bad. The dialog is empty, the characters unlikeable and after an extremely slow pace, a mediocre point is made.
The story is basically about a ship full of mutated humans who have been outcast by society. Eventually, they receive a special envoy from Earth with an unexpected message.
The basic problem is that this whole movie could have been summarized into a sentence and making a 1 hour movie out of it added nothing. What you essentially get is some effectively gross-looking characters with dialog that is so boring you want to blow their ship up every 5 minutes.
The director, Jonathon Frakes, is a bright fellow but not a very good director. That coupled with a simplistic script (and possibly other limitations) lead to this bad result. Brian Dennehy and John Hurt are well-established character actors so it's hard to believe that this is their fault.
If you recorded this on a TIVO-like device, don't fast forward through it. Delete it.