What an impressive feat of world building. There's your summary, people.
District 9 starts out as a documentary in the way you would expect from its previews. You've got your young looking historians who set the background up for you; basically, aliens showed up in a giant mothership, we put them in slums (named District 9) because we're assholes, and now we want to move them to what amounts to a concentration camp because we're still assholes. The historians are engaging, and the news clips and so forth immerse you quickly. As far as I was concerned aliens really were hanging out in the slums of Africa, and that absurdly ominous mothership really was just floating there silently like some sort of giant freaky bomb waiting to go off. This was a bleak world, but a world I was very keen on exploring. Clearly there was a story in need of telling.
Oh man, and the aliens. They have shots of the aliens right away, and they look fantastic. I'm honestly not sure whether they had guys in sweet looking alien suits or just massive amounts of CG or what, but the aliens were right there! Right there in front of you tearing a pig in half. Yeesh. They click, they scamper around, their mouth tentacle things move a bunch, and they eat cat food cans whole. Absolutely fantastic stuff.
The opening historian / newsreels bits are spliced together with "archival footage" of some annoying office worker guy with a funny accent and a sign labeled "I'm the guy who dies first" taped to his back. More specifically, this guy has just been promoted to lead troops into District 9 and hand out eviction notices to all the aliens. Everyone gets ready to head on in, and the world of District 9 has been laid out for us beautifully.
Then, as you would expect, it turns into a mediocre action / horror flick.
Here Be Spoilers
As much as the action sequences are cool, they aren't special in the modern day where everything looks cool. Flipping a car over the head of one's giant robot suit is awesome, as was the electrically charged mushroom cloud explosions of some of the guns. Not much other that was particularly unique, though. People exploding is... well, yeah. Blood splattering onto the camera is also... well, yeah. Very cool, but ew.
I liked the tense sequences, though. From the minute our hero gets sprayed by that black alien stuff, I was waiting for his head to suddenly explode every time he was on camera. More relief came for me when his alien arm was revealed than is natural. Isn't discovering that some dude is turning into an alien supposed to be a point where you freak the fuck out?
The MechWarrior battle suit was cool. Christopher Jones (I think was his name) has a hilarious name. Alien babies are alien babies, blowing up shacks full of eggs and describing it as like popping popcorn is horrible, and chopping off limbs is cringe-worthy even when they're no longer human limbs. I don't know, I wasn't terribly impressed after the first 30 minutes.
My thoughts about this film remind me of my thoughts on WALL.E. I want both movies to take their opening 15 minutes, extend it to be an opening 45 minutes, and then take a bunch of their excess crap and throw it out. That's less true for WALL.E, but this one had a ton of scenes that just ran way too long. For example, the shots of the alien ship getting beamed up into the mothership went on for 2-3 minutes when they should have taken about 30 seconds, and I'd say there should've been about 50% fewer exploding people.
...
Okay, maybe 20% fewer exploding people.
Then there's the main guy (who's name I don't recall). He's just... boring, I guess. I'd so much rather have seen him get killed like he was supposed to. Sure he was a decent guy, but I want more than that. Countless people have a wife and horrible in-laws. Countless people work in boring government offices. Countless people have no personality to speak of, yet you chose one of these people to be our protagonist. And no, an accent plus being small and timid does not a personality make. That's like choosing a memorable quirk or two from the list or random NPC traits in the Dungeon Master's Guide when you need a quick bartender on the fly; it's not how you make protagonists.
I guess I should mention the film's message: people are racist dicks. I know this, I've been told before. I don't think there's anything said here that goes above and beyond the marks other people have made on this thoroughly covered ground of moral issue. Not much else to say here, though I'd love to hear if anyone else got a bigger message out of District 9 than I did. Maybe I should take more from the fact that Christopher Jones is the person you end identifying with the most.
Spoilers End
Well. I did like it. I liked it a lot. The documentary parts were incredible. If the action and suspense sequences were just average, at least something about the film was dead on. No matter how much I may bitch about mediocrity, I still mostly enjoy it. It was a fun film. Very atmospheric. Very much a world building experience.
Oh, but please for the love of god don't franchise this, because a sequel would be awful.
SAM'S VERDICT: Great atmosphere, and suspense / action up to industry standards. Go see it if any of that sounds appealing to you.
Dude, Whatever, Wickus is the shit and I REALLY liked it. There was the nasty part with the teeth, but I think that violence never got tacky or comical, like endlessly exploding humans might.
ReplyDeleteAnd Wickus is SUPPOSED TO BE BORING (I think). From the very first interview, you can assume he is a less-than-average dude, and proves us wrong.
I was just talking about movies with morals, with my dad yesterday. He was talking about the Wrestler and said that "the moral" was that doing bad things caused more bad things or something along those lines. I think, that maybe, it was a movie.
Not that all movies are devoid of morals. In this case there was the very strong overlying segregation/race/species... issue, and THAT'S IT. I think they wanted to make a cool movie, done. Movies now a days don't seem to be teaching us, rather entertaining (THIS ISN'T A RANT).
And I agree that it should stop here. There should be no sequel. It would be not good. And dumb. And drawn out. The imagination is at work, and regardless of Christopher's return to save everyone/"fix" Wickus/declare war, we know that there was probably more upsets with alien human relations and another 2 HOURS would be so drawn out. Also, I do not want to see the BS that might come from seeing Christopher's son "grown up" or whatever.
Stupid.
LOVED THIS MOVIE THOUGH.
First a correction: it's Christopher Johnson, not Jones. My bad.
ReplyDeleteMarie's stuff: I'll take your comments on Wickus into consideration, but he still didn't do it for me. The less than average dude proving us wrong part of his character is cool, but the fact that he's so annoying is not.
I was thinking more, and for some reason the obvious Iraq parallel of the movie hadn't occurred to me. That context for the racism message gives the movie just enough more substance to make me feel better about the whole thing. Also, I'm fine with movies for the most part entertaining us rather than making us think as long as there's SOMEthing out there that's engaging my head.
And in case it wasn't clear, I did like this movie a lot. The action stuff wasn't sub-par; on the contrary, it was incredible. It's just that nearly all action films these days are incredible, and this one didn't stand out on that front. It stood out on the fake documentary front instead.