District 9: a review.

After a week and half rest after surgery, I have been antsy to get out and watch
this film. I gotta say, bloomkamp does more with 30 million bucks than most directors do with
100 million. first of all, I must say, most gory film and guts in a film than I have seen in a long time.
Yeech, don’t eat lunch before this one.

SPOILER ALERT:

Lead character who works for MNU begins as one of the most annoying and obnoxious
movie characters I have ever seen, but does a great job by the end. He is also one of the least intelligent
characters in a movie but that plays in his favor because it is true, we have idiots in charge of the world.
He is a bureaucrat with all that means, a well meaning but totally clueless bureaucrat. But why this emphasis on
this character? Because this person’s transformation (in every sense of the word) is what moves this movie.
Strip everything else away and what we are left with is a man who loses everything including his humanity.
But what does he do? He has given the prawns (whither they know it or not) hope. But it leaves us with
the movie’s strength, which is what about the future? What will happen in three years when or if the mother ship
returns. that is this movie’s real strength, it leaves us with this question. what will happen/
I see a sequel coming, but I hope to damm
they get bloomkamp to make this sequel.

Kropotkin

So boring I left halfway through to sneak into a chick flick. No, seriously. A really terrible movie, if you havent been unfortunate to suffer through it, don’t.

You must be talking about some other movie.

Best blending of sci-fi/social commentary I’ve pretty much ever seen. CGI totally and seamlessly emplaced into the real-life footage. Almost zero cliché count. Almost a documentary. Along with “Orphan” the best film so far this year. I need some catfood.

I admit the CGI was good, but thats hardly a selling point. Nearly every sci fi movie these days has excellent CGI.

As for social commentary, cmon now. Wow, the aliens end up being just like poor africans, antisocial, rioting, and drug addicted. Wow. And they happen to land in Africa. The parallels are shocking :unamused: The documentary style was extremely distracting, the constant cut aways to interviews that were jumbled and erratic, not to mention the acting was pretty poor. Lacking any semblance of a plot other than “Hey we gotta evict all these africans, er I mean aliens, for being socially disruptive and poor, and place them in a new government ghetto, oh no will there be conflict???” after over an hour, I felt I had wasted $8. Maybe the movie suddenly gets super awesome in the second half, stops with the jerking crappy camera work and poor acting, and not so veiled negative analogies between africans and aliens, but im not going to stick around and suffer for over an hour to find out.

The surprise ending is that there is no surprise ending. The acting is good, exactly because it was clunky, sometimes wooden and wholly mundane - because that reflects life, in that you, I, and everybody are truly crappy actors, constantly fluffing our badly improv’ed lines, and missing even the largest and most obvious cues.

Which is why, amid the usual glossy and aloe-vera conditioned pulp-film bullshit fodder we are usually spoon-fed like drooling idiots lolling in our comfy chairs, this stood out.

The camera of life jerks, because we are jerks. And so are aliens.

Just not my cup of tea, I suppose.

I may give it another go at some point when the DVD comes out. Then again, maybe not.

I don’t understand why people enjoyed that movie.

I saw it opening night and I remembered thinking the final 20 minutes were incredible

but I mean

the rest of the movie and plot were pretty weak

it was like “oh hey I need to find this one tube of substance and if I don’t then i’m screwed”

I enjoyed the movie (whilst drinking a tea) with a friend - what threw the whole plot for me, was 1. the fact that world governments would have stepped in to deal with/examine/monitor/learn about the aliens, and not leave South Africa to it’s own devices on such a world-shattering matter as that, and 2. not even South Africans would be as dumb as to treat aliens, who obviously have the intelligence to space-travel, as if they were dumb second-rate low lifes - so the whole plot lost it’s meaning on those two premises, but that didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the movie in it’s entirety.

“Not even South-Africans.” Let’s just call you Mags-Tactful-J from now on. :laughing:

Anyway. You have a car I presume. And you know how to drive it. Could you build it…? Could you write down the equations that describe it’s motion and powertrain…?

Simply possessing a technology does not exempt you from stupidity. I mean look at all the Chavs with the latest mobile phones…

:smiley:

…in reality, the aliens would not have been treated like that, which was where the film fell short for me, and there would be expertise among the aliens to at least maintain their craft, just like any car owner learns vehicle maintenance 101 at the very least.

I saw this movie in theaters and I could not get into it. I remember being annoyed by the movie because I wanted to like it but I couldn’t figure out what it was trying to say, or I didn’t like the message it was giving. I remember not liking the main character dude and not liking the movie for trying to make us like him by turning him into the victim and getting us to feel sorry for him, then making him the hero and getting us to like him after all. I felt indignant the whole time. I kept looking for some kind of deeper point. It’s certainly an interesting question - what would we do if a population of ungoverned, barely intelligible aliens who land stranded on earth? There was the potential for District 9 to meaningfully confront an issue like this, but from what I remember the film just focused on the one alien and the one human - and neither of them was an especially credible character. Maybe I missed something…

I can’t say whether this film was making some larger point about South African politics or, for that matter, a more general point about race and disenfranchisement. It seemed to me a not-so-subtle allegory about the military-industrial complex and could have, therefore, been some left-wing commentary about the United States. However you slice it, it seems the film had commentary enough. Does it work, though, on a more basic cinematic level? When I see a film that I would regard as “Best Picture” material, I expect to be sitting in my seat as the credits roll thinking, ‘Wow, that was a great movie.’ I had no such reaction to District 9, sorry to say. Not that there wasn’t a certain ‘wow’ factor. The CGI, as has been mentioned above, was almost scary real. The imaginative plot scores points just for its reach. I was captivated. I wanted to see what happens next. I liked this film. But as a Best Picture candidate, it was overrated (then again, the Academy decided to choose ten of them this year so being overrated was a foregone conclusion for at least half the nominees). It got a bit silly, I thought, when Wikus strapped himself into the Ultra Tin Man and began wreaking total havoc towards the end, but a film like this invites a certain amount of silliness. I had the feeling I was supposed to bond a bit more with Chris (aliens apparently have very human names) and his son, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Maybe it was the configuration of the alien heads, bringing to mind Medusa more than ET, but something was definitely missing for me.

All in all, however, I was entertained. Great movie? No. Good movie? Sure, why not.

7.5/10

What did you all think of The Hurt Locker?

I thought The Hurt Locker was great. I felt pretty immersed when I watched it and after comparing it to Green Zone (which is another film about Iraq that recently hit theaters) I thought the acting in The Hurt Locker was much better and the characters and story less cliche. But then the Green Zone was reaching for a plot of much larger scope. Also, the suit in The Hurt Locker reminded me of Bomberman.

Isn’t your question a little out of place in this thread?

I saw it (District 9), recently, and I liked it.
Unlike others, I saw it as a comedy/satire/parody.

The alien mother ship being smelly and filthy is an irony for many other movies and hopes of many humans believing and wishing aliens and their to be in good shape/shiny,

And crating walled ghetto (like Jews, Nazis, and many other nation/people) in South Africa is a good joke.
Even the white MNU armored carriers look like UN convoys.
And the humanitarian operation (for prawns) is similar to UN or NGO operation.
The main comedian was pretty funny during the operation, too.

Nice entertaining/amusing film. :smiley:

I thought Sci-fi and political/military ingredients were the base for kicking and inverting politically-correct (and serious/moral/ethically-minded) perspectives upside-down, to show absurdity of things and to have fun.

I found District 9 to be very clever, amusing, and at the same time very offputting. It’s clearly an anti-apartheid movie disguised as a hilariously funny satire, and at the same time very disturbing, dystopian futurist documentary. But somehow I just can’t watch much gross out stuff any more, even with a wit and a message as well delivered as that in this movie.

Maybe I’m just getting sick and tired of sci fi, I don’t know. I watch Fringe because I love Walter so much and the plot has improved tremendously, and I love Warehouse 13 and Eureka because they’re so clever and quirky. Those shows are most watchable and interesting, not overly gross at all.

I still recommend District 9, though. It really turns the alien-human perspective on its head, which was nice to see. As I said, some parts were laugh out loud funny and the satire is fantastic, plus the basic premise which is so different from most sci fi films.

A friend told me he liked it because of all the plot elements it left unanswered, such as an explanation for the aliens’ arrival. But he didn’t like calling it sci-fi. What might we call it then? Dark social satire, with some great humor along with the tragedy and ultimate hope, disguised as sci fi? He says that the stuff he likes he’s always termed speculative fiction, as it has more to do with human issues than futuristic technology. Ursula Le Guin called PK Dick “a homegrown Borges”.

As for me, I just don’t think the term speculative fiction does either the fiction or the shows justice… it’s too general and includes just about everything. I understand where my friend is coming from, though. He doesn’t want to include these more intelligently conceived social satires in the same genre as the cheesy versions of white america right or wrong… and a better description of the genre is not a bad idea.

Finally, we decided that the best of them would be more accurately termed Dystopian. As someone once put it, I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work.

I like the idea of PK Dick as a homegrown Borges, but I’ll have to think more about that one… it’s not intuitive for me, that’s for sure. Eco reminds me much more of Borges than Dick.

Another friend liked the way it was filmed kind of like a documentary. Indeed, District 9 was filmed like a combination of those cheesy B movie sci fi/monster movies and the grainy documentaries with the air of verisimilitude. The interviewees are all really stereotypical and shallow effigies of their respective jobs, just hilarious. Wikus and his wife were laugh out loud funny, especially in conjunction with the psychologist/anthropologist type. Seeing Wikus’ transformation was very difficult, but in the end it was translational (in the religious sense of being moved or formed to a higher more refined state as to the gods) as symbolized by the eerily lovely flower that grew out of his prawn hand.

The humour was great Jonquil, but South Africa would not have been left to their own devices on such an earth-shattering event as aliens landing on the planet… in reality, which was at the back of my mind during the whole film lol, but otherwise the storyline worked for me. :stuck_out_tongue: