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"District 9" Best Sci-fi Movie of 09?
Travis wrote in with a story that says much of what my friends have been saying to me all weekend: "Slashdot covered 'District 9' back in July. I was originally excited to see this movie for its exhibition of exoskeleton robot 'mechs' (see images and video at Hizook.com ). After watching the film this opening weekend, I can honestly say that it was an amazing science fiction movie! Everything was spot-on: the plot, the human elements, the alien elements, the technology, and the seamless blend of special effects with real camera capture. This film should vault Neill Blomkamp into sci-fi stardom, on par with George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame). This is certainly a must-see movie — easily the best movie of the year."
The third act is where the movie devolved into traditional Hollywood tropes.
The long-awaited shootout with the asshole who has been hounding the protagonist since the first act. Pitting two factions, MNU + Nigerians, against each other. The hero being saved by the downtrodden prawns at the very last minute.
The little alien Wesley Crusher who's in the downed alien craft and after 20 years discovers how he can wake up the mothership to save the day.
How the love for an adult and his child can make anything happen.
Finally two adversaries become friends much like Dragonball Z.
Everything leading up to the end was good but it's like they ran out of ideas.
Okay, they ran out of good ideas.
I think "Moon" has been the only other major sci-fi non-sequel I've seen in the theaters in a long while...
I liked D9 and hope it does well.
/sig
That is a fucking insult if you ask me.
The film has a great look. I think alien films in daylight and with the psuedo-documentary looks are the hardest things to film.
The viral ad campaign has been very interesting with the fake NMU ads and such.
I have much hope for this movie, but if it ends up being just another EVIL CORPORATION movie, I will be disappointed.
You guys in america probably won't have seen it, but Moon was awesome. And didn't "Star Trek" count as sci-fi, at least to most people?
Can't we all at least agree that while this movie may have had its weak points, it also had some very strong ones, and all things considered it is in fact a decent sci-fi film in a year that seems likely to produce a few of those; which, last time I checked, is the exception? From my perspective the past few years have been on average a baron wasteland of terrible purely "Hollywood" style sci-fi films not worth half of what I had to pay to go see them in theaters.
If there is one movie you see all year, see District 9. There's action, aliens, a little romance and one very well written story with some nicely animated cgi. I'm usually picky about sci-fi and almost never wanted to see the latest cool new release, but this movie really is tops. I was even more surprised that parts of the movie brought forth some relatively strong emotions. Also, I think the movie does try to send a message and does a good job of it. Ok, I don't want to be anymore of a movie reviewer here so go see it for yourselves.
I suppose I can agree with the summary if we are talking about the George Lucas that made "Jar Jar" -- but not the George Lucas I imagine existed before that. The movie has a strange mix of incredibly awesome and stunningly amateurish or "dumbed down by committee" pieces that kind of made me angry that it fell short of its total awesomeness potential. Kind of like making a Transformer movie and then produce toys that don't transform. Who would think that's a good idea? Thank god Hollywood would never do something like that, so I wouldn't ever have to explain to a three year old on Christmas, "No, honey, it doesn't transform into a semi truck; it's just a robot" ANYWAY you should see District 9 if you haven't but don't expect it to be soo awesome in total, it's pretty good, though. My wife is the true sci-fi fan so I'll wait for her report back tomorrow.
Saw this yesterday, thought it was awesome. At its heart the plot isn't necessarily that original, but the execution is sublime. The "hero" and many of the other characters and weapons/vehicles/etc. feel so much more vulnerable than in any other holywood movie.
In every other movie you shoot at someone and miss completely if they're the good guy. Or your car/spaceship/cat is invulnerable to missiles conveniently. Not in this movie.
HOWEVER, the combination of shaky cam and gore left everyone I went with feeling a bit nauseous. I'm really not even sure if it was the shaky cam or the gore that did it. Please put a bullet in these shaky cams. For whatever reason they're being used, it's not worth it.
I saw District 9 this Friday, and I have to agree that it was a great piece of cinematic sci-fi: an allegory for apartheid with a very human unlikely hero and some great popcorn-fodder action sequences. I'd like to remind everyone, though, that it still has some competition for year's best sci-fi movie in the form of Moon, which is a drama of isolation, loneliness, and ethics set in the stark, cold beauty of space, very reminiscent of 2001. While it doesn't match the action of D-9, it makes up for it with its emotional intensity and thoughtfulness. I highly recommend any Slashdot movie fans out there see both.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
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Overall, was tremendously impressed with the look, feel, cinematography, etc. Documentary style absolutely made the movie. And I generally loath shaky-cam. Thing is, shaky-cam has generally been used to imply that you *are* someone, so you never see what the hell is happening, whereas in District 9, it makes you feel like you're *watching* something, so you follow the action but feel the peril. Very effective.
There were some *amazing* scenes - I can't go into it due to spoilers, but really, unbelievably cringe-inducing moments of humanist horror. There is a richness to the interaction of the main character with his world that I just haven't seen elsewhere.
My friends and I kept looking over at each other with wild grins on our faces, unable to believe how intense, crazy, and just totally new the whole thing was. I really can't recommend it highly enough.
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Are you saying that this movie is as good/groundbreaking as Star Wars or The Matrix? I am somewhat dubious.
Lots of movies have been billed as "the next star wars" but in terms of success and popular impact, the Matrix is the only one that really nailed it, at least as far as sci-fi's gone. I don't know if geeks will be having matrix-themed weddings decades from now but hey, it's already got ruinous sequels just like Star Wars!
I hear District 9 is good but will probably remain on the scifi geek list rather than crossing over into the mainstream like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Probably more like a Blade Runner or Terminator 1 or 2. I wouldn't quite put LOTR on the same cultural impact comparison list since Star Wars and Matrix did not exist in any form before the theatrical release whereas LOTR has been loved for decades beforehand -- in other words, it had already made quite an impact before Peter Jackson touched it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Moon. He's on the dark side, mining Helium-3. And he's on the frickin' MOON. Not to mention that the story and acting is excellent. I liked District 9, but Moon is better.
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Even non-SciFi? The first film I remember being irritated by the shakeycam effect was Saving Private Ryan - science fiction only took the effect because war films used it and it was perceived from there as being more realistic.
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I'm sure I will be in the minority here, but I left feeling empty because of the gaping holes in the plot. I left the theater feeling like I had taken about 6 restroom breaks and missed storyline, only I didn't leave once.
Here are the issues I had:
1) Where did the aliens come from, why were they in our galaxy? why did they leave? Would it have been so much to ask to piece together some of the back-story for the viewer so we could relate better to their plight?
2) WTF happened to all of the aliens who knew shit about how to run their starship? Why is it their population consists of 99.999-percent idiotic worker-class drones and what happened to their intelligent leaders? Why did precisely 1 intelligent alien survive this?
3) How believable can it be that this fluid has a very specific dual purpose of a) turning humans into Prawns, and being unleaded gasoline for your starships?
4) The gore was completely over the top and detracted from our enjoyment.
5) We made the mistake of sitting close to the screen and the shaky camera gave me a splitting headache.
I felt like this movie is a lot like the Defying Gravity series on ABC. The movie is trying so hard to tell a heart-wrenching story that the sci-fi aspects become a crappy afterthought for the writers.
If there was any shakycam in it, that was sporadic and limited at best (worst).
I base that on the fact that I don't remember any, and I've sat through all of it (some of it couple of times) and Serenity and I've liked it all.
OTOH... BSG annoyed me constantly with its continuous shakycam so I was barely able to last to mid-season 2. Never saw it entirely. Don't plan to.
Could watch Firefly again though...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I suppose Peter Jackson's name was the only thing that kept this from being laughed out of Hollywood. 'District 9' and 'Moon' are the best sci-fi movies I've seen in awhile.
Are you saying that this movie is as good/groundbreaking as Star Wars orThe Matrix? I am somewhat dubious.
Yes. It. Is.
No one has done anything like this before. The style of seamless blending of handheld, real documentary, fake news, CCTV (security cam) and live action fluid is tight. There is even first-person/third-person shooter cams. It's a distinctly unique style of "omniscient" camera person which can which from any source / any angle, yet while blending and cutting between all of them, it still feels cohesive and non-jarring.
The integration of the aliens into the movie is especially groundbreaking and unique. There are aliens in literally 80-90% of the scenes and they look real. Not like Jar-Jar Binks or people in outfits. The look dirty and solid. Their textures reflect the environment. They move and interact with the environment like real creatures. You can actually *BELIEVE* they are there. Trust me, the special effects on this movie are unlike ANYTHING you've even seen before and that doesn't even count the action scenes.
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Looks interesting, I'll definitely Netflix it.
To be honest, if I could only have see one film in the actual Theatres this year out of all the ones I've already seen, I would chose District 9 - that includes comparing it to Star Trek, Harry Potter, Transformers, etc. It's definitely a "Big Screen"-worthy experience.
This movie really is groundbreaking in many facets and there is no way you can simply dismiss it regardless of how many other movies are coming out this year. Your whole, "hum drum oh maybe I'll watch it on Netflix" attitude shows you're not even seriously interested in District 9. I didn't know much about it but it blew me away completely Besides, you're in now way qualified to pass any judgements on this movie until YOU'VE ACTUALLY SEEN IT.
I enjoyed the film quite a lot. I think it has had one of the best ad campaigns in years. I've seen billboards with advisories against picking up alien hitchhikers (warning of a $10,000 fine). The best was the ad banner on a bus simply saying "This bus is for humans only!" and the prawn icon with the red slashed circle. Brilliant, and massively attention getting. I can't recall the last time I heard people at work discussing a billboard.
Warning, might be spoilers:
:-/
Let me say that I was highly disappointed with this movie, and surely I can't be the only one. I went to see it last night, and walked away not recommending it to anyone. There were definite plot holes, the hero (Van De Merwe) I had a hard time rooting for instead of rooting that we would just get shot. He was weak and pathetic, and only had courage while in the exo-suit, and even then, he was wishy-washy. His character was sort of like Borat, the sound effects sounded like the Matrix, and I just couldn't believe the government would allow the Nigerians to become so powerful inside the district, especially when they knew how dangerous they were. The father in law was evil for no apparent reason, and his wife suddenly believes Wilkus without explanation why? I don't know, I just don't buy it at all. A lot of the gore was unneeded, and made me turn away from the screen a few times... Did we really need to see him biting off his nails? And yes, I did think the parts where the humans blew up from the alien weapons were cool, but it just begs the question, why weren't the aliens using the weanpos to revolt instead of selling them to the Nigerians?
All in all, I just found the movie to be simply unbelievable (yes, I KNOW it is only sci-fi, but still, c'mon!) that were this situation to occur, I just can't see people acting like that. I'd expect tighter government controls, with more international pressures. If this movie wanted to be about apartheid, which is a good social justice issues movie, it needed a little more believability to it, and a little more on the interactions between humans/aliens when the aliens first arrived.
Mod me up or down, I don't care, it was just that I was expecting so much more, and left feeling like I got a better deal on the popcorn
You're wrong. In fact, one of the real strengths of the movie is that both the white people and the black people involved are inherently self-interested and capable of huge atrocities. Even the aliens come off as wretched individuals (though you don't really see them do anything that isn't unjustified.)
It isn't about alien apartheid. It's about South Africa.
People don't remember what Paris is famous for? I remember hearing about her pretty clearly - My reaction was, "There's a leaked sex tape of who? What, you mean like the hotel chain?" And then the pathetic part, "Interesting - I'll have to check it out."
To this day I can't figure out why she's maintained any level of fame. Some bad acting in bad movies, worthless reality TV, and a media frenzy over rich-bitch-goes-to-jail.
The Wachowski brothers at least did something memorable - It's a pity that there were no sequels.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The director, Verhoeven, was disgusted with the book. As a dutch liberal he probably felt that the the world view propagated in the book was too totalitarian. The movie is a counter-argument to the book. It tries to be a movie (or art in more general) produced by such a society described in the book. And very well in my opinion. If you don't believe me, watch it again. All the "would you like to know more" -stuff indicates that you are in fact watching a movie from that era what the movie is about.
The fact that the movie even tries to take part in a serious debate about the society in general is a plus. That it does it well, is a double plus. That it goes on and don't try to re-do the book but to continue the theme of the book is a such a fashion is double-double plus.
Please have some knowledge of the movie you're talking about before you go spouting about what "dutch liberals probably feel." The movie had a plot and script and was in preproduction before the rights to the book were secured -- they changed some character names and a few plot points in order to make it Starship Troopers but most of the production team hadn't even read the book before shooting the film.
My anal-ness for accuracy being satisfied, the rest of your point is good and well-taken :-)
Nope. Bourne Supremacy. Shook the hell out of the fricking camera for 15 minutes during a fight scene.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Starship Troopers?
*ducks* ;)
Well, it does tell us something about ourselves: how easily we resort to fascism in times of war, and how tempting it will seem to do so. And I don't think the movie, lame though it may be, is all that wrong there.
The movie was practically completely unrelated to the book, but I agree with you: the movie was better. Not great, but better.
The book is basically just a script for a military action movie. The movie actually shows a little bit of human insight into our fascist tendencies, and does so in a pretty creepy and believable way. Other than that, there's not much of interest in the movie, and it makes little sense in lots of places, but that one bit of insight is still more than most movies have these days.
I had the opportunity to interview writer/director Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, who plays Wikus van der Merwe. Here's the link to the interview and to the review I published this past week. I think that Blomkamp will continue to impress us if he keeps focused on further developing the story and the characters in his future films. Is it a perfect film? No. Most sci-fi is far from the depths of where cinematic drama can reach, but this is a respectable start for a first time film director who was spared, I will say, of the critical failure that Halo is destined to become. As someone else mentioned, I've also followed Blomkamp's work from Tetra Vaal to his CitrÃen and VW ads, and the film short "Alive in Joburg" which I've linked in the interview page URL I've posted here.
Keep in mind that the ship has been sitting there for 28 years, without any noticeable change. The scientists, the media, the philosophers all got bored and went home 20 years ago.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
the CGI effects were astoundingly good. Best I've ever seen
The fact that they produced the best looking special effects you've EVER SEEN on a budget less than 1/10 that of a normal summer blockbuster didn't phase you as something groundbreaking or revolutionary ?
There were plenty more elements to the plot than apartheid. Personally, I felt the bigger parts of the plot were the interactions between the main character and his wife -- who is rarely shown but constantly mentioned throughout the movie. Despite everything that Wikus is undergoing, he is actually gaining humanity throughout the movie rather than losing it -- and his connection to his wife is the greatest force driving him... not some apartheid or megacorporation. Yes, those are shallow devices to setup the situation and they certainly have some flaws, but in the end, this is a uniquely personal and human journey of fear and loss that Wikus takes us through.
I don't think the primary point was apartheid. If it was, using SA as the setting would be way too obvious, and well... stupid. Of course the setting being SA brings additional clues to the broader message but it wasn't purely apartheid. It was primarily about oppression. Oppression in terms of the oppressors can turn in to the oppressed at any moment, so think twice about how good of an idea oppressing people is. It might be serving your interest today but tomorrow you may be the one being oppressed. Also the point of the oppressor never being as strong as they really think they are and the oppressed never being as weak as people think they are. Sometimes the oppressed get really big flippin guns and shoot your ass with them.
Granted, there were guns and explosions. And the notion that a few ounces of fuel was all it took to fly the giant mothership back to wherever it came from was a bit hard to swallow... But if that's all you got out of District 9 then you weren't paying attention.
Try substituting the mothership full of Prawns for a boatload of Africans/Irish/Chinese and see if it makes any more sense.
The aliens are given a derogatory name... They're assumed to be lazy, unmotivated, unintelligent... They're crammed into slums... They're the target of much fear, prejudice, violence, and hatred... They're exploited in every way possible... They're treated as nothing more than livestock or animals... Any of this sounding familiar?
The dude isn't turned into a mix of alien & human, he eventually turns completely into an alien. At the end there is no way to differentiate him from any other Prawn. It's a very obvious and heavy-handed way to point out that the Prawns are no different than humans and in no way deserve their mistreatment.
Then you've got all the ugly bits of humanity that don't look quite as ugly in the context of Humans vs. Aliens - but look far more ugly when you start thinking of them as funny-looking humans.
The MNU Soldiers marching around in their white outfits... Killing Prawns just because it's fun to watch them die...
Wikus willing to sacrifice hundreds (thousands?) of Prawns just so he doesn't have to look like one of them...
MNU conducting all sorts of medical experiments on the Prawns...
Seriously. If all you noticed was some explosions and robots, you missed out on a fantastic movie.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Whereas the apartheid metaphor was obvious, it was certainly not central to understanding and appreciating the story. If anything, the film seemed to go out of its way to make the point that this was NOT an exercise in so-called "white guilt" -- the reluctant human hero was a white guy and some of the nastiest villains were black.
This was a concept film. As such, yes, the concept was simple and there wasn't much "story." It told the story it needed to tell and nothing more.
(spoilers ahead)
To me, one of the most interesting and most genuinely SF-like aspects of the film was the way the that we were easily led to interpret the behavior of the prawns as random and aimless, inscrutably alien. Old junk collecting, circuit boards hung from the walls, seemed like weird habits until the film switched to giving us translations of the aliens' thoughts. When we learned they were collecting fuel and building an apparatus to distill it, we had to reevaluate what looked moments earlier like low-level scavenging.
Then there were the unanswered questions: Was the captain a higher mental caste than the rank and file aliens? Why did the captain evacuate the ship in the first place if it was safe to return to? I like that the film didn't even attempt to resolve such issues. In real life situations are not neatly wrapped up and I feel that added to the verisimilitude.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The movie was practically completely unrelated to the book, but I agree with you: the movie was better. Not great, but better.
The book is basically just a script for a military action movie. The movie actually shows a little bit of human insight into our fascist tendencies, and does so in a pretty creepy and believable way. Other than that, there's not much of interest in the movie, and it makes little sense in lots of places, but that one bit of insight is still more than most movies have these days.
In the book it becomes much more clear that the humans and the arachnids are very much the same: 8 eyes, jumping capabilities, things that the film did/could not show.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
I just went and saw the movie, and, just to get my biases out of the way, I hated it. I thought it was simplistic, that they clubbed you over the head with the apartheid metaphor, and that the oft-praised special effects were no better than many other films we've seen, except that the blurrycam makes their flaws less noticeable.
All of that's beside the point, though- the real dealbreaker was the incessant deus ex moments and sudden changes of heart among the main characters. It felt like the scriptwriters were less interested in developing the characters, or even plotting the trajectory of already well-understood characters, than in doing the least amount of work possible to scoot them between a number of predetermined plot points. You remember when mr.fuckfuckfuck clubbed christopher and left him to die with the paramilitary guys, coincidentally invalidating the entire I-want-to-go-up-so-you-can-fix-me plot? You remember how five minutes later christopher does his "I'll never leave you" moment? Right. Good movies don't do that, because real people don't do that. And District 9 did it about every 10 minutes. Add to that what you call the "unanswered questions" and what I call the "plot holes", and all you're left with is another poorly done, film-school-metaphorical disposable sci-fi flick.
That's not to say the movie doesn't have its good points. I thought the pacing was well done in the textbook sense, and certainly the initial documentary style scenes were well crafted to hook the audience- I was honestly looking forward to seeing how those conflicting opinions would converge into the story at hand, at least until said story 'developed'. But its merits are small, its flaws are many, and at the end of the day, if this is the greatest sci-fi movie of the year it's my opinion that sci-fi is in a lot of trouble. Your mileage may vary.
Wikus is a bureaucratic simpleton thrust into a situation far beyond his grasp. One of the major things I enjoyed about the film was watching the development of his character. With every plot twist, I had to wonder -- is he beginning to see? Does he understand now what he's been a part of? Is he beginning to get a better sense of life from the Prawns' point of view?
It was that constant character suspense -- do I want to root for Wikus yet or not? -- that was part of what made the movie such an edge-of-the-seat experience for me.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Sure, I'll take on that strawman.
1. "You don't know; you're not an alien." Christopher may be bipedal and his offspring may have some charmingly human-child-like qualities, but the amount we don't know about him (if "him" is even the best word to use) far outweighs what we do know. What he's actually thinking may be radically different than what we'd expect. Who says that an alien is EVER going to act like a psychologically sound person? (This movie immediately made me think of "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell, an excellent novel of human-alien dys-interaction.)
2. What we do know about Christopher is that yes, he has been working on some sort of plan for 20 years, which at least one part of is to get the big ship working again and "go for help", whatever that means. We really don't know much beyond that about either the alien or the plan.
3. We assume that the subtitles at the bottom of the screen are accurate translations of what the aliens are saying and are reflections of their true intentions. About a third of the way through the movie, I started thinking about the bemusing and often bizarre subtitles on anime, and immediately threw the "accurate translation" assumption away. And I now suspect that mistranslation may be an underlying theme of the film, much like "Lost In Tokyo". Really, how could it not be?
Case in point: the aliens show up with enough firepower to easily take over South Africa, if not a much larger part of the Earth. Yet they don't even try. Why is that? What are they up to? Is the shipload of seeming refugees perhaps a sort of test? Judging human society by how we treat the untouchables (or, as it turns out, our prisoners)? Or is it a front for agents like Christopher to carry out a hidden agenda? Or are they simply...alien?
So, yeah, I call un-BS. And I'm very curious to see how things play out in the sequel.
All the TV interviews were real unscripted questions asked of real South Africans on illegal immigrants in South Africa. I quote from here: To give the short a realistic feel, Blomkamp interviewed real people about the influx of immigrants into real-life Johannesburg; their frank answers to questions about Zimbabweans and other refugees were transformed into documentary-style commentary on extraterrestrials unwanted by a fearful local population. (See Alive in Joburg below.)
Everyone harping on about how this is about Apartheid is wrong. It's about modern, everyday xenophobia, alive and kicking in place like South Africa and havens of moral rectitude like the US of fucking A where just as many people hate foreigners because they're, uhm, foreign as people anywhere else do.
But no, it's set in South Africa, so it must be about Aparthied, right? I mean nothing else ever happened there, right?
I thought it was more about refugee camps. Of course, apertheid is an obvious element, but much of it is also a commentray on the vast number of displaced people currently living in squalor and treated with disregard by the authorities and population in general.
... and then they built the supercollider.