I am NOT a professional review writer so please take this with a grain of salt. The following are simply my opinions, albeit fairly well informed ones. Also I recommend understanding there will be SPOILERS below as I am going to explain exactly WHY I think what I do about this movie.
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Sometimes when going out to see a movie with a lot of promise that winds up falling flat on it's face it surprises me when that same movie winds up receiving so many positive reviews in the fandom community. I guess with so many fairly banal science fiction and fantasy movies out there, that any twitch of semi-life is seen as a big success to some, I however think we can expect more.
What District 9 basically is, is an unusually insipid politically correct rant hidden behind the veneer of very weak science fiction, which takes a back seat to the "statement". Oh yes and there is some decent eye candy here and there as well, but truthfully I feel that was there was kind of ruined by other factors within the movie.
The basic plot is "Alien Nation" as re-envisioned by a pack of retarded chimpanzees. Basically a space ship comes to earth, the aliens on board it are mostly low-caste "workers" with little in the way of skills and incapable of using a lot of their own tech effectively never mind getting their ship to work. Pretty much Alien Nation verbatim, except in this case we're dealing with lobster-like "Prawns" as opposed to fairly human looking aliens with bald heads and spots.
Where "Alien Nation" through both the movies and TV series was able to fill in a lot of the blanks, and cover most of the bases, providing a *fairly* realistic picture of first contact with and the intergration of another life form, District 9 pretty much decides to forsake any kind of logic for the sake of making a political statement.
Basically, we are treated to a morality tale in the holy land of racism: South Africa. The "wonderful" nation where we went from having a long term regime of whites oppressing blacks, only to be replaced by a regime where things were reversedto blacks oppressiong
whites after outside interferance. Things staying largely the same and the region remaining a quagmire.
Into this little slice 'o heaven we drop a group of aliens, who are of course oppressed by humans in an odd parallel to all of the racism and oppression in the region.
Had an alien ship arrived over the third world, first world nations would be all over it. Nobody would be saying "gee, why don't we let a corperate conglomerate of mercenaries and businessmen run everything". Even if one could not get the technology to work, you'd have people from all over the globe up in the space ship itself trying to reverse engineer it.
You'd also have the aliens themselves being brought all over the globe, as opposed to being dumped in some politically touching refugee hell hole. Studies on biology, linguistics, and everything else. Pretty much every academic on the planet would want to spend some time with these guys.
Yet a key point of this movie is basically that even after "cracking the hull" of the alien ship people just go "oh gee, there is no command circuit and we can't get anything to work" and give up.
What's more the "deep secret" of the corperate alliance running things is that they are trying to engineer gene tech to use alien hand weapons and such. Not really a bad thing until you realize that the entire operation is written by morons. See apparently these guys are vivisectioning aliens and such to figure out how they tick. You know, sort of like technology hasn't progressed any since Dr. Mengele in the 1940s and we don't have modern medical devices for analyzing bodies and such (CAT scans, etc...). Research I might add which would have every medical facility on earth doing back flips to get in on. If I was running the "secret" (but really just common sense) research on how to activate the DNA locks on alien tech (while of course other teams would be looking at the science itself in hopes of reverse engineering it) I'd simply be gathering the information collected by like.... oh Yale, rather than slicing up aliens with the cutting edge of nearly 70 year old science. Plus nature being what it is there are going to be corpses to examine without needing to intentionally create them.
I guess the point of this "review" though it's more of a warning and synopsis, is to say "wait for tape". It's not all it's cracked up to be. There are some decent ideas at play here, but honestly all of them are retreads of things that have been done better elsewhere. If you stop and think about this movie you'll be going "huh" quite a few times.
The movie is pretty good when you want to see a shallow metaphor for racism and the politics of a converversial nation. This is a movie where your going to have what seems to be private multinational corperations (a common bad guy) running an alien ghetto system that is undergoing a thinly veiled equivilent of the misunderstood "Trail Of Tears". There will be a protaganist who admittedly does develop as a character (going from truely reprehensible to almost tolerable), and plenty of gore, explosions, and even an alien mech.
In the end though if you try and analyze it to the point of say trying to write your own paper and pencil RPG setting/adventure about it, you'll find there are just so many problems and things that don't make any sense that it's ridiculous.
Contrary to what people say this is *NOT* a smart movie, it's just not totally lobotomized like a lot of other movies recently. I mean they actually HAVE a metaphor for some real world issues for example, despite the fact that it's a bad one. You also have a character who changes signifigantly over the course of the movie, which stands out largely in comparison to movies where there is none.
I sort of feel like Yahtzee did last year when he reviewed Grand Theft Auto IV positively and then later recanted it when better games came out, by simply pointing out that there was so much schlock that ANYTHING remotely decent looked better than it actually was in comparison to what else was out there.
Truthfully if you like the "District 9" premise I recommend going out and getting a boxed set of the "Alien Nation" TV series or something. Not the best thing out there, but it did these ideas better than District 9 did. Moviebob (Escapist reviewer) seemed to make the same connection I did, simply defining District 9 as being "Darker", but in this case I tend to feel it's the stupid kind of "darker" rather than something that logically followed as part of the premise. I mean sure, the idea of slicing up a sentinent creature for purposes of "souless corperate arms research" is pretty dark, but then when you consider there is no reason why anyone is likely to have to do that it simply serves to jar you away from the overall experience.
No idea if anyone will have read this far (many probably stopped early on). This is my opinion and the impressions I walked away from the movie with. Many (such as Moviebob who considers it a 10/10) are going to disagree, and I feel they are perfectly entitled to their disagreement (the world would be boring if we all agreed). However please do not flame me, or cut part of the post out and say "I didn't read beyond this, Lulz". I also have the right to express my opinion even when it conflicts with the fanboyism of others.
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Sometimes when going out to see a movie with a lot of promise that winds up falling flat on it's face it surprises me when that same movie winds up receiving so many positive reviews in the fandom community. I guess with so many fairly banal science fiction and fantasy movies out there, that any twitch of semi-life is seen as a big success to some, I however think we can expect more.
What District 9 basically is, is an unusually insipid politically correct rant hidden behind the veneer of very weak science fiction, which takes a back seat to the "statement". Oh yes and there is some decent eye candy here and there as well, but truthfully I feel that was there was kind of ruined by other factors within the movie.
The basic plot is "Alien Nation" as re-envisioned by a pack of retarded chimpanzees. Basically a space ship comes to earth, the aliens on board it are mostly low-caste "workers" with little in the way of skills and incapable of using a lot of their own tech effectively never mind getting their ship to work. Pretty much Alien Nation verbatim, except in this case we're dealing with lobster-like "Prawns" as opposed to fairly human looking aliens with bald heads and spots.
Where "Alien Nation" through both the movies and TV series was able to fill in a lot of the blanks, and cover most of the bases, providing a *fairly* realistic picture of first contact with and the intergration of another life form, District 9 pretty much decides to forsake any kind of logic for the sake of making a political statement.
Basically, we are treated to a morality tale in the holy land of racism: South Africa. The "wonderful" nation where we went from having a long term regime of whites oppressing blacks, only to be replaced by a regime where things were reversedto blacks oppressiong
whites after outside interferance. Things staying largely the same and the region remaining a quagmire.
Into this little slice 'o heaven we drop a group of aliens, who are of course oppressed by humans in an odd parallel to all of the racism and oppression in the region.
Had an alien ship arrived over the third world, first world nations would be all over it. Nobody would be saying "gee, why don't we let a corperate conglomerate of mercenaries and businessmen run everything". Even if one could not get the technology to work, you'd have people from all over the globe up in the space ship itself trying to reverse engineer it.
You'd also have the aliens themselves being brought all over the globe, as opposed to being dumped in some politically touching refugee hell hole. Studies on biology, linguistics, and everything else. Pretty much every academic on the planet would want to spend some time with these guys.
Yet a key point of this movie is basically that even after "cracking the hull" of the alien ship people just go "oh gee, there is no command circuit and we can't get anything to work" and give up.
What's more the "deep secret" of the corperate alliance running things is that they are trying to engineer gene tech to use alien hand weapons and such. Not really a bad thing until you realize that the entire operation is written by morons. See apparently these guys are vivisectioning aliens and such to figure out how they tick. You know, sort of like technology hasn't progressed any since Dr. Mengele in the 1940s and we don't have modern medical devices for analyzing bodies and such (CAT scans, etc...). Research I might add which would have every medical facility on earth doing back flips to get in on. If I was running the "secret" (but really just common sense) research on how to activate the DNA locks on alien tech (while of course other teams would be looking at the science itself in hopes of reverse engineering it) I'd simply be gathering the information collected by like.... oh Yale, rather than slicing up aliens with the cutting edge of nearly 70 year old science. Plus nature being what it is there are going to be corpses to examine without needing to intentionally create them.
I guess the point of this "review" though it's more of a warning and synopsis, is to say "wait for tape". It's not all it's cracked up to be. There are some decent ideas at play here, but honestly all of them are retreads of things that have been done better elsewhere. If you stop and think about this movie you'll be going "huh" quite a few times.
The movie is pretty good when you want to see a shallow metaphor for racism and the politics of a converversial nation. This is a movie where your going to have what seems to be private multinational corperations (a common bad guy) running an alien ghetto system that is undergoing a thinly veiled equivilent of the misunderstood "Trail Of Tears". There will be a protaganist who admittedly does develop as a character (going from truely reprehensible to almost tolerable), and plenty of gore, explosions, and even an alien mech.
In the end though if you try and analyze it to the point of say trying to write your own paper and pencil RPG setting/adventure about it, you'll find there are just so many problems and things that don't make any sense that it's ridiculous.
Contrary to what people say this is *NOT* a smart movie, it's just not totally lobotomized like a lot of other movies recently. I mean they actually HAVE a metaphor for some real world issues for example, despite the fact that it's a bad one. You also have a character who changes signifigantly over the course of the movie, which stands out largely in comparison to movies where there is none.
I sort of feel like Yahtzee did last year when he reviewed Grand Theft Auto IV positively and then later recanted it when better games came out, by simply pointing out that there was so much schlock that ANYTHING remotely decent looked better than it actually was in comparison to what else was out there.
Truthfully if you like the "District 9" premise I recommend going out and getting a boxed set of the "Alien Nation" TV series or something. Not the best thing out there, but it did these ideas better than District 9 did. Moviebob (Escapist reviewer) seemed to make the same connection I did, simply defining District 9 as being "Darker", but in this case I tend to feel it's the stupid kind of "darker" rather than something that logically followed as part of the premise. I mean sure, the idea of slicing up a sentinent creature for purposes of "souless corperate arms research" is pretty dark, but then when you consider there is no reason why anyone is likely to have to do that it simply serves to jar you away from the overall experience.
No idea if anyone will have read this far (many probably stopped early on). This is my opinion and the impressions I walked away from the movie with. Many (such as Moviebob who considers it a 10/10) are going to disagree, and I feel they are perfectly entitled to their disagreement (the world would be boring if we all agreed). However please do not flame me, or cut part of the post out and say "I didn't read beyond this, Lulz". I also have the right to express my opinion even when it conflicts with the fanboyism of others.
