District 9 Rises From the Ashes of Halo

JohnSmedley sent in a story about what might be the last SciFi film worth caring about this summer. He writes "Wired has an interesting piece up on the upcoming District 9 release. District 9 rose from the ashes of a failed Halo movie and expands on 'Alive in Jo'Burg' which is a South African short film by Blomkamp. Both the short and full feature films expand and explore a premise in which aliens in space are treated as badly as illegal immigrants and the underclass. The story begins as a damaged alien craft lands in Africa. The foreign race is quarantined in a remote area called District 9, and from there are subjected to xenophobia, and the desire of a multi-national conglomerate to steal their technology. The film is an exploration of what would happen in terms of segregation between an alien race and humans, subjecting the stranded visitors to the very human condition of greed, fear, and exploitation. District 9 will be in theatres on August 14'th, and you can view the trailers from the viewpoint of Multi-National United."

Comments

Alien Nation

[RenHoek]

So.. it sounds like the premise of the Sci-Fi series 'Alient Nation'.. which was a very good series.

Just kind happy that it's not Hollywood SighFi

[theolein]

I'm South African so yay for South Africans of all colours, shapes and broken accents, and yay for an SA director making a really interesting SF movie set in SA. It is really nice to see something that isn't shallow Hollywood crap. It might be shallow South African crap, but at least it's different and interesting shallow South African crap.

Re:Just kind happy that it's not Hollywood SighFi

[amilo100]

Switch to Al Jazeera at this moment and you will see a pretty telling picture. Joburg municipal workers are on strike and they really make a mess when they strike (vandalism, etcâ¦). There are also âoeservice deliveryâ strikes (although none in Joburg as far as I know). There is no doubt that the inner cities decayed a lot in the last 5 to 10 years (of both Joburg and Pretoria â" the decay in Pretoria at least bottomed out).

You can get the statistics for the past few years at the SAPSâ(TM) site: http://www.saps.gov.za/statistics/reports/crimestats/2008/crime_stats.htm You should however bear in mind that statistics tampering has become widespread in the past few years.

This country has a lot of problems â" unfortunately a lot of foreign people are not willing to accept that (and still cling to the âoerainbow nationâ fallacy). Problems locally also do not get handled because any criticism against the government or the ANC is seen as racism. This coupled with a criminal for president really removes the confidence in the future of South Africa from any rational person.

"1984" vs "WE"

[jbssm]

Actually I'm a big fan of Orwell, but after reading We from Zamiatine. I must say that Orwell, was at least "heavily inspired" (not to say an harsher word), by the much less know work of Zamiatine.