Escape to the Movies: District 9

[Nodrog]

I loved this movie. It's smart and it's got balls. Truly a rare find. This Bloomkamp guy has got style. As an artist, I have a lot of respect for this guy's unique vision.

I was a little taken aback by the "Douchebag pirating site" part. I have respect for directors and musicians. I'll only pirate if something has DRM. It's my little act of rebellion against a BS policy. Though I know what he means. Sometimes there's no honor among thieves.

 

[Hammered]

Cannot wait to go see this!

 

[Jirlond]

Will be seeing this soon

 

[Netrosis]

I can't remember if this is my first post or not, oh well here goes nothing...
Edit: Ah yep it is my first. I'm more of a lurker than a poster.

Now for District 9
Its a very down to earth movie, I love the gritty realism in it.

Thumbs up to Niel Blomkamp and Peter Jackson, for such a fine movie.
Thumbs up to Sharlto Copley, amazing acting considering this was his debut film. I seriously doubt the film would have been worth it if he didn't seem so darn realistic, in fact the whole movie is incredibly realistic.

That being said I heard it was a Sci-Fi action movie with aliens in it. You can forgive me thinking I was going to see something along the lines of Starship Troopers with armies pitted against armies. So I was quite perplexed when I sat down and here's this documentary with the typical "shaky cam" style, introducing the characters. I'd kinda point that to be incredibly similar to the starting scene of Cloverfield, if it was a documentary.

To be honest some of the scenes at the start are boring. I'm not a big fan of watching people going around knocking on other people's doors, but if I watched it a second time I'd certainly try to pay more attention. There is lots of attention to detail, and some of the sweeping shots of the city capture the magnitude of everything.

Also, I wasn't expecting the kind of gore that was in there. I have a weak stomach and I nearly had to race off to the bathroom (nearly!). It was bareable.

For a movie with such an awesome backstory, they certainly left a big hole in what happened for 20 years. Obviously they've lived there for 20 years, and yet there's next to no discussion of foreign influences. Surely if aliens landed on earth, the entire world would be interested in them.

Though, its refreshing to see a movie not set in America, have an American lead, and aliens that actually only speak alien.

The action scenes are completely worth it, with some spectacular flesh fireworks.

Though, I don't think I'm going to eat prawns any time soon.
So while the first half was quite so-so for me, the movie was still pretty awesome, and something I'd be very happy to watch a second time. It's setup for a very nice Sequel (and a Prequel too).
Can't wait for District 10.

I posted a review on my own website if anyone's interested in reading it.
http://forums.deletionquality.net/showthread.php?t=9321

 

[Dartinin]

DO NOT WATCH DISTRICT 9
The acting was horrible
The action was subpar
The ending was nether surprising or conclusive
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU WATCH THIS MOVE
NO MATER HOW BAD UR TASTES ARE THIS MOVIE IS NOT WORTH UR MONEY OR YOUR TIME
please learn from my mistake and save urself the horrible boredom that is distract 9
(i am not a action movie junkie, i actually like to have to think while watching a movie ... this movie didn't make me think or at all portray the characters as being anything more then B movie stars -_- i cant think of one good thing about this movie other then the fact that it was made by at least one inexpressive ... um producer or director who i can blame for this being such a horrible failure)this is no clover field and not by any standards a good movie DO NOT WASTE YOU MONEY WATCHING IT!

 

[Dartinin]

I can't remember if this is my first post or not, oh well here goes nothing...
Edit: Ah yep it is my first. I'm more of a lurker than a poster.

Now for District 9
Its a very down to earth movie, I love the gritty realism in it.

Thumbs up to Niel Blomkamp and Peter Jackson, for such a fine movie.
Thumbs up to Sharlto Copley, amazing acting considering this was his debut film. I seriously doubt the film would have been worth it if he didn't seem so darn realistic, in fact the whole movie is incredibly realistic.
(ok i got to this point when i started thinking"what movie are you watching my friend" )

I can honestly say i couldn't no mater how hard i tried make any of these people seem ... real .. unless every person u know is an incredible ass hole ... maybe that's why i couldn't get into it ... taken i couldn't find who i was supposed to root for(i suppose the aliens were the only descent creature in this whole movie >.>) ... every human in this movie seemed to be begging to die and die painfully(and i do mean EVERY HUMAN) ... i don't want to spoil it ...for anyone still thinking of watching it soo ill keep my comments to that.

 

[atomicmrpelly]

Wow. I saw the trailer and would never have guessed! I think I'll go and see this!

 

[bickster]

45 minutes of boring followed by 45 minutes of brilliance is what I found from Distric 9

 

[MrGuyMan]

RE: District 9

While there are a lot of cool things...this movie is all around an average summer action movie.

There are huge plot holes. There are huge continuity errors all over the place. Issues are raised, glanced over, and then replaced with exploding bodies (awesome btw).

The handjob Bob gave was a little much.

Being my first post and all I wanted to go into a tad bit more detail:

(Only Get One Free)
Plot Hole:

Walk through LA or Manhattan and you run into more people with more language issues than you see in this entire move. Every word is understood when it is needed. Twenty-years? To completely or mostly learn and teach a language to millions of people and aliens? Uh, no, sorry, linguists(mostly the one who pointed it out to me) will tell you that is a virtual impossibility. That would be fine if it were not a movie that was supposed to be "delving into the blah blah blah clashing of societies"

Bonus:

Issue Abandoned:

Man's cruelty is briefly address then dropped to make room for "super cool alien guns" that were new and different in DOOM II.

These are examples of a lot more that exists and some of you might think, "Oh you are nitpicking".

Action movie? I'd never do it but a movie that critics are treating as some classic of social reflection in our time I absolutely will.

This movie smacks of juvenile concepts of human/societal interaction in the writing and the constant forcing of sex(Mammal on Arthropod-type rarely works sexually) and violence to dodge issues you want to raise and failed to follow through on is just amateur.

 

[cheese_wizington]

Totally agree; loved the movie and the review.

Thanks Movie Bob man.

 

[TornadoADV]

Saying this is the best movie of the summer isn't really much of a compliment considering what has come out before it. I can see this becoming a Cult Classic like Starship Troopers without the legs like Alien to make decent sequels.

Basically the movie just turns into a poor reason to bend the laws of reality shooting people with LIGHTNING guns who don't have the common sense to use something like I don't know...an Armored Vehicle, they had one in front of the damn HQ! Basically 1 part trite social dialogue of South African history + 1 part unrealistic plot (Too Stupid To Live comes to mind) and 1 part Exosuit Porngraphy.

I'd love to punch the guy who thought they could somehow logically have a man portable gun that fired more energy then what you get when struck by lightning.

 

[MondayJokerAnfiniti]

I Personally thought District 9 was one best original (not a sequel, remake or adaptaion) sci-fi films of the decade.

Also most of the alien wepons we're easily recognizable from video games. wheather they were intentional refrences to the games or just coincidence.....I don't know.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I had the opportunity to watch District 9 last weekend. While it was indeed a breath of fresh air, blissfully free of many of the overdone formulas Hollywood clings to like a life preserver in a shark-infested ocean, it was not the perfect effort some are claiming it to be. Here are a few issues I had with the movie.

- The movie can't seem to settle on the issues it wants to make us think about. It's an allegory for apartheid. No, now it's about humanity's instinctive dislike of anything it can't understand or exploit. No, now it's about unrestrained corporate greed. I didn't feel like it really stayed long enough on any of the subjects it raised to give us a real in-depth exploration. (And the whole Voodoo side-plot with the warlord wanting to eat Wikus's arm just felt entirely unnecessary and tacked-on.) It's hard to criticize Blommkamp for this, though- this IS his first large-scale effort.

- We're not given nearly enough insight in how the Prawns are different. We're given one throwaway line as to how they don't understand the concept of ownership, and then for the rest of the film, the entire Prawn population- with the exception of Christopher and son- is merely a backdrop labeled "The Others". An alien species from an entirely different branch of the evolutionary tree is dropped in humanity's dusty backyard- but a chance at what could have been a deeply insightful look into how humans treat things truly different from them is completely overlooked. Intead, the Prawns are simply a stand-in for "Oppressed Group X".

- None of the Prawns tell us how they think or feel. In fact, aside from Christopher's son, the cohort who's shot in the head, and the one Prawn making weapon deals with the warlord, not a single Prawn has more than one speaking line. A single five-minute scene with Christopher telling Wikus more about his species and their hopes and dreams would have been an exponential improvement on this. That bizarre line near the beginning about cross-species prostitution shows that there's got to be SOMEthing going on beneath the surface in Prawn society.

Now, with that said, there's a lot of positive to focus on in this movie as well. Sharlto Copely does a great job portraying Wikus, turning from bland corporate mid-level nobody into confused, frightened and ultimately angry fugitive. The part where his wife calls him back and renews his dedication was pretty heavy-handed, but for the rest of the movie you can honestly believe that this was just some poor schlub caught up in seriously bad fallout from a simple mistake.

I'll also put in a good word on the CGI effects. They were better than some of the ones I saw in Return to the King (I'm looking at you, "Legolas climbing the oliphant" scene), and the Prawns were convincing characters, never seeming to be out of place or superimposed. Impressive for the budget the movie worked with.

I'm not at all sorry that I went to see the movie. It was a far sight better than many "blockbuster" flicks I've seen, and like MovieBob said, it married serious cinema with action-flick style far better than a good number of other films have.

 

[Disthron]

This is definatly one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Some people have been saying that the first half an hower or so is a boring but as a documentary fan I thought it was aswome and an exelant way to introduce the audeanc to an alternat history seting. As opposed to asuming the audiance had checked out the moch websites that had been created for the film. I loved the action and I also apresiated that you picked up on how the human lead was a doshbag.

This is definatly the best film I've seen all year, though I have not seen Inglorius Basterds yet so maybe that will top this but regardless it's still a grate film. Here's hoping that it will make some decent money so even it there's no sequle at least we could see some more work from this directoer.

 

[BlueInkAlchemist]

The 2009 {Star Trek} movie, by contrast, comes off pretty poorly (again, IMO) versus many of it's contemporaries - i.e. other big-scale scifi blockbusters. It's far, FAR below District 9, Dark Knight, Watchmen, Iron Man, the first-two Spider-Mans, Serenity, the first Matrix... hell, it's not even as good as Fifth Element or Event Horizon. It's not even as good at it's own genre as Starship Troopers... and that was a PARODY

On the one hand, I agree that the meta-themes and characterization that made Star Trek such a powerful and pervasive part of modern science fiction (and I'm talking mostly about the original series and the Next Generation here) were rather watered down for the latest film. On the other hand, I disagree that Starship Troopers was a better movie.

Troopers had some of the fascistic elements that Heinlein wove into his seminal novel, but you only get that for about a third of the film before it becomes the kind of sci-fi shooter that makes Halo look well-written. In the case of the 2009 Star Trek film, there's a thematic element of bold adventurism and self-discovery that moves under the flashy set pieces and attractive cast members, or at least it was a theme I picked up on when I saw it.

Is it the best Trek movie? No. Does it stand up next to District 9 or Iron Man or Watchmen or the Dark Knight or Serenity? No.

But it's quite a bit better than either Nemesis or the dreadful Enterprise series, and if I'm suffering from lowered expectations, I blame tripe like THAT.

 

[BlueInkAlchemist]

So, District 9.

It left me with a few unanswered questions. How did the aliens learn our language so quickly, and how did we come to understand theirs? Why would alien beings, with a completely different evolutionary path from humanity, find human women attractive enough to want to bang prostitutes? If the mothership was without power, how did it remain hovering over Johannesburg for twenty years without crashing into an urban area and killing millions?

The reason these questions don't bother me as much as they might others is because I was focused more on the writing and direction of this film than the science or logistics. And the writing and direction are superb. Here are characters that are well-rounded, flawed and believable. It's nice to see a protagonist in a film who isn't a swaggering, self-congratulatory macho killing machine. Given that we almost had a Halo movie instead of this, I'll go ahead and make the following statement:

Wikus van de Merwe is a better written and more compelling 'hero' than Master Chief.

He's a big reason District 9 is so good. Oh, I could talk about the seamless integration of the alien characters or the gunfights in the slums or the impressively unapologetic look at the usurious nature of humanity. But Wikus, from the snivelling mid-level bureaucrat to the confused and desperate escapee to the angry fugitive, is a consistently realistic protagonist to whom just about anyone could relate. I think a lot of the people disappointed in District 9 went in expecting a proxy for Halo, and they got a psuedo Master Chief in the driven, direct and take-no-prisoners MNU operative Venter, who leads the PMC's armed forces in the search for Wikus. Venter's like most heroes in first-person shooters: macho, gritty, cool under fire and spiteful against his foes. Paired up with Wikus, however, we see him for who he really is. He's a villain and a murderer, let off his leash by power-hungry greedy men in suits who see him and Wikus alike as line items on a ledger.

I think I'm wandering from my point. My point is that District 9 is peerless storytelling and damn good cinema, and we don't have enough of it in this day and age. I may not gush as much about it as MovieBob does, but he's right about one thing: show these hard-working storytellers some fucking support.

 

[Gear001]

Now I want to make a point about Halo. A: The original Halo had an original story when it first came out. It has only been copied THOUSANDS of times so that most appeal by now has been lost. B: Read. The fucking. Books. I am not kidding when I say that Halo's expanded univers was the first thing that got me into the series (thats right, I read the books before I played the game). They could easily make a movie that has depth and action with the creation of the Spartan program and the birth of Master Chief (figuratively speaking). Im just asking for you to give it a shot.

 

[CanadianWolverine]

Awesome movie.

Simply put, the movie amounted to an allegory of humanity demonizing and exploiting each other - with Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, and Heavy Gear style weapons.

Hopefully, some of those who see this movie will realize how racism makes humanity very ugly and stupid. Even if there isn't a epiphany, hopefully the viewer will at least enjoy seeing some alien tech go "Boom!"

I plan on buying this when it comes out on DVD, thus rate it "To Own". My wife knows how rarely I say such things about movies, thus plans on going to see it with me and I will gladly go watch it a second time. Take that for what you will.

 

[Tarik94]

i agree with you 1000%

 

[Abe_Z]

Quite possibly the best movie I have seen in my life so far. I haven't been emotionally captivated with a character EVER before this movie. I literally fought back tears in a few scenes, but then let it go the second time (yes, I've seen it twice and will probably see it a third time if me and my wife can't find a movie that interests both of us by this weekend). Movie Bob's review is all that needs to be said to someone who hasn't seen this movie yet. "Go see this movie"! The Green Mile is probably the closest movie I can think of that really emotionally got to me, but not like this one. The development in story and character alone was artistic in itself; the sympathy I felt for the main character alone was something I've rarely have experienced before if ever. The visual effects can't even be justified with words. Go and see!