District 9
posted on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 16:42 by
theshadow
In 2009 and an extraterrestrial ship has appeared over South America with refugees from another world. Twenty years have passed and the humanity's welcome has been worn out. The landing site of the aliens has deteriorated into a military controlled ghetto known as District 9. Where various government and private entities seek exploit them.
Now you would think that this sounds like an amazing movie. You get strange aliens taking residence on earth, trying to just survive as various organizations attempt to exploit them for their technology. At least, this is what I was expecting. What I got on the other hand was a ridiculous and shallow plot buried beneath a mountain of craptacular acting and writing, excessive (almost to the point of superfluous) gore, absolutely nauseating and confusing cinematography and plot holes so deep and wide they made the Grand Canyon look like just a crack in the ground.
Starting off with the acting, the cast was filled with unknowns. Which, in and of itself isn't bad. I've seen movies filled with new faces turn out to be really good. This however, was not one such example. The lead character Wikus Van De Merwe is played by Sharlto Copley. The guy brought nothing to this main character, we understand that this main character is supposed to go through a life changing experience and transition from an asshole to the protagonist but geeze.
I just couldn't like the guy. He was whinny and complained and I kid you not almost every single one of his lines contained cursing. Fuck this, fuck that, fuck you, fuck me, fuck it all, fuck, fuck, and more fuck! There was no personality in the character you just wanted to get up and smack him. It wasn't even until the very end where you even started to connect with the character but for the rest of the movie you just hated the guy.
The main antagonist was Multi-National United or MNU. A major global corporation, who was supposedly the leader of private security and weapons development (Sounds like an Umbrella Corp. rip off to me). Who sent their security expert to contain the situations which was a gun-ho, xenophobic, crazy individual who you'd believe would fit right in at Blackwater Security. I'd quote who he was but to be honest I don't think I ever caught his name. As a matter of fact you couldn't even really connect with the antagonist because he was rarely on screen and was usually just being an asshole when he was. He lead a team of "red shirts" who all died, none of his team survived, each one died some sort of gruesome death most often caused by their own arrogance and stupidity.
Speaking of gore, boy oh boy was there gore. I used to think that Starship Troopers was the most overdone gory movie I'd seen in the sci-fi category. Boy was this trumped. Anytime someone died it was in some gruesome and body mutilating fashion that always ended with some form of body matter landing on the camera "lens". This movie puts Rambo to shame in terms of body count. Whats worse is that most of its uncalled for. It adds nothing to the story other than to show off special effects.
Which leads me to the next point. They dropped quite a bit of money into the special effects and it shows. They look nice for the most part, but they decided to go with a handy-cam type of filming which lead to a bunch of jitters and horrible shots. Things constantly being out of focus or off in the distance. Handy-cam can work. I've seen it work in various movies. It was a horrible idea for this film. You're already having issues keeping track of all the red shirts, aliens, and barely visible plot but now you have to concentrate to capture the visual clues and foreshadowing through a jumpy and horrible shots.
Lastly, as previously stated the plot was almost non-existent. Not because it lacked a story, the story was there it was just spotty at best. Some of the glaring questions never answered by the conclusion of the movie were: Why did the aliens come to earth? Why were they refugees? Why didn't they come forward and state they were trying to go home? They had technology that made our weapons look like toys, why were they letting the humans keep them in squalor? Why does some strange black liquid thats part of their technology cause a genetic metamorphosis in humans? Why did the alien take the mother ship and leave his people after saying he wasn't going to let them be used as experiments? The questions just kept growing and answers were no where to be found.
This movie came recommended by a couple of friends and has received great reviews on the internet. So I'm rather confused if those people and I watched the same movie because the experience they had and the one I had differ greatly. What I saw was a movie that had a lot of potential but got wrapped up and swallowed by the movie industry where everyone wanted more, more, more. As the saying goes, this movie was a lot of flash with little substance.
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