District 9

[Troy]

District 9 is pretty solid. It's easy for reviewers fall back on it being an anti-apartheid movie, but while that aspect is plainly obvious, the movie is really just a funny, weird and totally entertaining sci-fi action flick.

The first scenes where they're cleaning out the Prawn slum and relocating them felt almost Boratish in the way the Wilkis' character's stupid, yet earnest manner was played for laughs. Then, as Wilkis gets infected, the movie turns into The Fly. The second half, when he's on the run in D9, the movie basically turns into a videogame, I was constantly reminded of one of those Tom Clancey 1st person shooter games that take place in an African slum, but with Halo-ish armored suits and wicked alien weapons that basically make people vaporize is a big red splash. Lots of action and violence in the 2nd half.

In some ways the movie's extremely innovative, unpredictable and clever, but in others it's totally predictable and obvious. My biggest problem was with the language. Between the Prawns garbled squeakings, the Nigerian gang's clicking and popping and the weirdly round Afrikaaner dialect, I thought the movie just sounded ugly and annoying. And I had an impossible time believing all these different characters were being able to understand what each other was saying. I couldn't buy that.

But all that aside, it's quite entertaining, and not at all what I expected with all the reviews and people in the street always talking about the Apartheid metaphor. I almost didn't see this flick because these reviews make it sound rather dull and political. (I went seeking a/c on a 100° afternoon) Yes, that aspect is there, but D9 is not specifically about that at all. It's really just a gross, uncomfortably funny, sci-fi action shoot-em-up / bug hunt.

8 out of 10 piece Prawn dinner after the movie.

[s dog]

District 9 is pretty solid. It's easy for reviewers fall back on it being an anti-apartheid movie, but while that aspect is plainly obvious, the movie is really just a funny, weird and totally entertaining sci-fi action flick.

The first scenes where they're cleaning out the Prawn slum and relocating them felt almost Boratish in the way the Wilkis' character's stupid, yet earnest manner was played for laughs. Then, as Wilkis gets infected, the movie turns into The Fly. The second half, when he's on the run in D9, the movie basically turns into a videogame, I was constantly reminded of one of those Tom Clancey 1st person shooter games that take place in an African slum, but with Halo-ish armored suits and wicked alien weapons that basically make people vaporize is a big red splash. Lots of action and violence in the 2nd half.

In some ways the movie's extremely innovative, unpredictable and clever, but in others it's totally predictable and obvious. My biggest problem was with the language. Between the Prawns garbled squeakings, the Nigerian gang's clicking and popping and the weirdly round Afrikaaner dialect, I thought the movie just sounded ugly and annoying. And I had an impossible time believing all these different characters were being able to understand what each other was saying. I couldn't buy that.

But all that aside, it's quite entertaining, and not at all what I expected with all the reviews and people in the street always talking about the Apartheid metaphor. I almost didn't see this flick because these reviews make it sound rather dull and political. (I went seeking a/c on a 100° afternoon) Yes, that aspect is there, but D9 is not specifically about that at all. It's really just a gross, uncomfortably funny, sci-fi action shoot-em-up / bug hunt.

8 out of 10 piece Prawn dinner after the movie. I thought it was disturbing, gross and definitely NOT a make you feel good movie, The weapons were pretty cool, For the most part i liked this film but it was strange.

[kexodusc]

I have to agree with Troy on this one...not nearly as political as some reviews suggested it might be, and definitely had the video game thing going on...I thought I read somewhere that Peter Jackson was working on Halo or some sci-fi game and it ended up becoming D9 due to politics...maybe someone knows the whole story there.

Much, much better than Transformers or GI Joe, which maybe isn't giving D9 enough credit.

[Troy]

Can I give Transformers no stars? What a stupid movie. I didn't see GI Joe because I stopped playing with action figures in 1971. I figure it'll be on HBO 90 times a week around thanksgiving anyway, so I'll watch it then. I'm not expecting much from that either. I can't even begin to understand what people see in crap like that. Especially when you have something so perplexing, different and yes, strange in D9 as an option. It was quite provocative, a real talk-about-it-the-next-day kinda movie.

And yes s dog, strange should be good. The good movies, the ones that people remember, are the ones that make half the audience scratch their heads and say "WTF was that about?"

[3LB]

I saw this, and I agree it was entertaining, but there were so many little inconsistancies, like the lead actor Wilkis' constantly slipping in and out of accent, his being married to a hottie, the robot-battle mech that is in one scene impervious to bullets (because it looks cool) but not the next (cuz it needs to be vulnerable), plus the aforementioned language problem Troy mentioned. This plot was so patchwork...like Troy said, it was two different movies - the first half was like a Terry Gilliam flick, and the second half, Jerry Bruckheimer.

The political subplot, though more about refugees than apartheid, quickly takes a nazi-ish turn and the plot gets simpler rather than more intriguing. It ain't as deep as some would like to make out to be, because isn't clever enough to be deep.

D9 will be remembered for being an interesting movie in a summer of underachievement and dreck.

[Kam]

i enjoyed it a lot and found it the ridiculously happy ending to be quite cheerful actually, even though i generally prefer darker endings.

and forget the alien technology, someone tell me who made that cell phone battery!! that thing lasted forever.

[nightflier]

Holy crap. I was expecting to see a mind-numbing Independence Day redo. That was definitely not this movie. I didn't mind all the inconsistencies, after all, we're talking about an alien space ship hovering over Johannesburg for 20 years, right? I also noticed when we walked out that a good majority of the folks watching this were black - so it certainly strikes a chord on some level. I actually thought the movie was extremely political on several levels and left me with a lot of questions:

- Why South Africa? Is it because South Africa had such an inordinately close relationship between business & the military for so long? Or is it because there were rumors that such experiments actually occurred during the Apartheid years? Imagine just for a minute, if Peter Jackson would have had the balls to leave the whole alien aspect out of this movie, and just made it about South Africa...

- Why add the element of the Nigerians? They made for an interesting sub-plot, but what a risk. I mean why Nigerians and not non-Africans? Why not a good-old-white-bred American gang? And why did they have to cannibalistic, or dare I say animal-like? That certainly added more politics to the film than necessary.

- But it's not just a white-black issue, because the lack of precautions taken by MNU made them seem positively uncivilized too. Not to mention that the mercenary leader, Pienaar is obviously a cro-magnon. It's almost as if the message is that South Africans haven't advanced as fast as the rest of the "civilized" world watching this. They are barbaric, cruel, money-grubbing vilains. Even Wikus is a blatant xenophobe and obviously a moronic tool.

That's just for the politics, of it, then there's all the philosophical questions: Are the Prawns an advanced version of us? Since they have the technology to change back & forth, then maybe they are us, but from the future. If so, then what happened in the labs of MNU, really is also their own history. Maybe that is why the alien Christopher Johnson, is so "understanding" of Wikus and the whole story behind it all. Obviously, some of the technology that the mothership left behind will be used and studied by MNU, and they certainly have shown they are not below dabbling with the forbidden fruit of genetic manipulation, so that may very well be the explanation.

When the scenes started with Wikus being experimented on the story started to remind me of ongoing themes in so many sci-fi stories. Even Christopher Johnson had an uncanny resemblance to Caesar from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. But the experiments on Wikus really reminded me of the Battlestar Galactica side-plots in Razor and Caprica. This has all happened before, this has all happened before... Yes, and so has this story.

...But it was one heck of a ride, to be sure.

[Mr Peabody]

I like Sci Fi and will probably catch this on a video rental. Transformers wasn't all that bad on a pure entertainment level. I remember GI Joe being on in the afternoons after school. I heard the movie sucked bad. I'll check it out if it ever comes on one of the movie channels.

[canuckle]

I don't know where to begin with how much I hated District 9. How about the stupid Blair Witch camera-work for starters? It added nothing but annoyance to the film. Every single character had maybe one dimension at best - they were nothing more than stupid caricatures with no depth, no development, and no capacity to make me care if they lived or died. Was there a plot? I'm pretty sure not. The dialogue was ridiculous. The aliens were boring, undeveloped, and uninteresting. The "battle" scenes made Transformers 2 look like Academy material. I sense they were trying for humour in a few spots but they sure missed that target by a mile.

So far, this is my worst movie of the year. A complete waste of time.

[nightflier]

Canuckle,

I could not disagree more. The camera work was hard to follow, but it added an element of urgency, IMO. The first part of the movie felt like a lower-budget documentary and I thought it did a very good job of making this more real and immediate. The story moved too fast for there to be a need to develop the characters more and I think that was the point: it added to the immediacy and reality of the story. As with documentaries and news flashes, the point isn't to develop the characters.

The fact that so many of the characters in the movie seemed lifeless also added to the plot. Take the executives, doctors and scientists at MNU for example - the fact that they did not seem to chow any compassion actually adds to the horrible message about the weapons industry. Was there a plot? Perhaps it was too deep or there were too many subplots, but it certainly wasn't plot-less. Did you read my post? I mean there's some things to think about in this movie, wouldn't you say?

I'll grant that the battle scenes were almost out of place, and I felt like they were trying too hard to compete with Transformers and other special-effects heavy-hitters. But I would not say that they were badly done - they were very much inline with the whole theme of the movie (documentary/newsflash).

No this movie is absolutely not the worst movie of the year, there's plenty of other titles for that honor, including Transformers, with its simplistic formulaic, Hollywood, kid-safe, plot-line and the ET-like anthropomorphizing of machines. If that's the baseline, then District 9 is certainly head & shoulders above that and its ilk.

[Troy]

District 9 is the worst movie of the year?

In a year with movies like GI Joe, Transformers 2, Saw 6, the Proposal, All About Steve, Couples Retreat and Cirque Du Freak there's simply no way D9 is the worst movie of the year!

[nightflier]

When we were deciding what to watch it was between Couples Retreat and District 9. I guess we picked the right one. Was Couples Retreat really that bad?

'Sure hope Pirate Radio is worth a matinee price.

[Troy]

When we were deciding what to watch it was between Couples Retreat and District 9. I guess we picked the right one. Was Couples Retreat really that bad?

'Sure hope Pirate Radio is worth a matinee price.

Couples Retreat got panned by virtually every critic in America:
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/couplesretreat

[Mr Peabody]

Nightflier, since when is "kid safe" a criticism? You saw the rating didn't you? I don't think nudity and four letter words would have added anything to Transformers 2. But there must be others with your mind set because T2 wasn't as kid safe as T1. Certainly were a few things I don't want my young ones to repeat. I can't deny 2 being formulated. It seems Hollywood and record companies suffer from the same stupidity.

[nightflier]

I meant that the plot was kid-safe: nothing requiring too much thought about philosophy, politics, or history.

[audio amateur]

I'm off to see it by myself:( tomorrow night in the theater they have here on campus. Looking forward!

[audio amateur]

Well I've just been and it was interesting to say the least. I have mixed feelings. They went up and down like a roller-coaster as the movie progressed. I preferred the '2nd part' of the film. At first I found the whole situation a bit ridiculous but then as the film progressed it caught my attention more and more. There's little character development to mention aside that of the main alien protagonist (Christopher I presume). The whole black thing as mentioned earlier I did find quite bizarre and unnecessary.
There's definitely a lot of material you can talk about. It was entertaining though. I especially liked the robot action part which reminded me of those in Matrix Revolutions, and the special effects I found to be very well done. So were the aliens, although a bit goofy/silly looking...

Sound wise, I noticed what appeared to be an obscene amount of LFE when the mothership finally starts to move. The front speakers atop the screen were completely bottoming out, which put a huge grin on my face. However I didn't notice any particular LF pressure which leads me to believe the subs weren't reaching deep enough (this is a small independent movie place on campus, which could explain the poor equipment).

[nightflier]

Sound wise, I noticed what appeared to be an obscene amount of LFE when the mothership finally starts to move. The front speakers atop the screen were completely bottoming out, which put a huge grin on my face. However I didn't notice any particular LF pressure which leads me to believe the subs weren't reaching deep enough (this is a small independent movie place on campus, which could explain the poor equipment).

Yes, I noticed that too. Should be great sub fodder for the HT/rental crowd (provided they have decent ones). I think this movie didn't fare too well in the theaters, but I'm guessing it will do well on disk.

[embertin]

No true fan of science fiction -- or, for that matter, cinema -- can help but thrill to the action, high stakes and suspense built around a very original chase movie.

[Mr Peabody]

Saw it on Blu Ray, loved it. I thought it was one of the best Sci Fi in a long time. D9, I don't know how to explain it, it's unique and a real story along the same level Dune was for me. I found it on a different level than movies like Transformers.

I suspect it was intentional because of the documentary style and it was from our view point but the movie did not get the viewer too involved with the aliens. They were here, this and this happened and except for the end we really don't get a feel for their mind set. I found them to be really passive considering things that happened to them.

As a BD side note there was a couple places with some serious low end.

Is it really considered cannibalism if one eats an alien? As long as it's not human? I mean I wouldn't want that to be the solution to illegal aliens. However, it probably would turn the travel flow the other direction.

[Hyfi]

I came home friday night from Red Box with this disk in my hand and found only Troy's original post. I had absolutely no idea what this movie was about as my wife requested it and said it was sci-fi. I heard no reviews or had talked to anyone who saw it.

I started to read Troy's post but stopped because I did not want it to sway my viewing of the movie. By the time I got back to this post there were already 15 or so replies.

I did not even think anything political or racial when watching the movie. I just took it for what it was. I do not think it was odd that they picked Africa. Have you never noticed here in the US that UFOs always land or are seen in remote areas where nobody is? As far as the Nigerians go, it had to be somebody and it looked as if their lifestyle fit the bill. Other than that, I did not read anything Racial or Political into this movie, just watched it as a science fiction flick.

The overall story was not bad but as stated earlier, many inconsistencies and loose ends. At first, they showed the area where the prawns were kept and it only looked like a square mile if that. They said there were 1.5 million living there but you never see more than 20 or so at a time and always an empty junk yard looking place. Then they move to another small area and say there are now 2.5 million but guess what, you only see 20 or so at a time.

Also, the little prawn would have been born here as they were already here 20 years, where did he learn to fly the spacecraft and learn all the screens? Since the one kept talking about fixing everything in 3 years, I thought the movie would have ended differently or maybe leading to a sequel.

This movie reminded me more of X-Files than anything else. As soon as the guy squirted the black stuff in his face, I immediately thought of the Black Oil.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie and the weapons were cool. The robot suit seems to have been copied from Iron Man and yes, in the beginning, impervious but later vulnerable. Which is it?

How did the humans learn the language and how did they learn ours? If they both understood each other, why did they both not speak one language?

I wouldn't mind watching this one again so hopefully in 20 years or so they will show it on the THIS Movie Chanel.

[Feanor]

I came home friday night from Red Box with this disk in my hand and found only Troy's original post. I had absolutely no idea what this movie was about as my wife requested it and said it was sci-fi. I heard no reviews or had talked to anyone who saw it.

I started to read Troy's post but stopped because I did not want it to sway my viewing of the movie. By the time I got back to this post there were already 15 or so replies.

...
Hyfi, I like your synopsis of District 9 is great and complements Troy's to some extent.

I saw D9 a couple of weeks ago and thought it was very good and a refreshing depature from the typical SciFi style.

As for the South African setting, it is abundantly obvious the writer wanted to exploit aspects of Apartheid to craft the plot and dialogue. The "stupid but earnest" attitude of the main protagonist is, of course, typical of mindless & brutal but rationalized, bigotry that is the muscle & sinew racial and religious discrimination everywhere.

Nightflier asked why the exploiter thugs were Nigerians rather not non-Africans (should I read whites?). If Nigerians are, in actuality, comprising criminal elements in S.A., then it would be excessive political correctness to demonize some other group.