I'll be honest with you... I'm not really sure WHAT I think about District 9 right now...Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike it, but I think it's one of those movies that may require a little mulling over and some general discussion before it really cements itself in my movie scale.
So let's start the mulling process and see where it takes us...
I will say this for District 9... while it uses a number of elements that we've seen before (movie masquerading as documentary/news footage, alien visitors as allegory, big corporations are bad, hero's journey), it still manages to feel very fresh and quite original. Maybe that's a simple as the South African setting. There's actually a line at the beginning of the movie about the fact that the alien craft didn't arrive over New York or LA or Chicago, but instead stopped at Johannesburg. Especially in the early part of the movie, that link between what is being said and shown on screen and the history of South Africa is quite visceral. And that's obviously entirely intentional.
In some ways the movie actually feels a little bit divided... there's all the early documentary style stuff, but as it goes along it becomes much more of a traditionally shot movie... in some ways that decision makes sense, it allows there to be a massive amount of backstory (or future backstory I guess, since there are references to things we don't know about yet) in a short period of time and it gets the movie to the plot's jumping off point much quicker than it would otherwise have been able to do. At the same time though, it also kinda serves to distance the viewer from what's going on... or at least it felt like that to me, and it's only as the story goes on that you begin to connect with the characters.
But that distance is actually more than just part of the storytelling style. The main character is actually not especially likeable. He's just a complete dork at the beginning, but not really in a way that allows you to laugh at the character... he's got this annoying officiousness about him and to me he just didn't seem a character I really cared about... and he doesn't really change that for perhaps three quarters of the movie.
And maybe that's the point. There really isn't a traditional, Hollywood, "hero" in this movie... he's just a guy, doing what a regular person might do in the extraordinary situation he finds himself in.
The whole movie does that actually. It feels very grounded... the way that the aliens are treated and dealt with feels very much like how you would imagine many of the world's governments would react to "visitors from beyond the stars", especially if they found themselves at the mercy of humanity. And the fact that the shacks inhabited by the aliens in the film were real shacks that had been or were being inhabited by real people somehow comes through without you even being aware of it. It doesn't feel like a movie set, it feels like a real place, even when things start to get pretty damn crazy towards the end of the movie.
Not that the end feels out of place, in fact the whole movie is a long slow build, so by the time you get to that point it doesn't feel strange.
The visual effects are excellent, and while it's impressive that every single walking, talking, breathing alien character is walking, talking, breathing CGI, I was actually very impressed by the alien spaceship. While it's not in the back of every scene, when it is, it hangs there looking as real as real can be.
Interestingly, while I'm usually the one who sees plotlines telegraphed well in advance, when the movie was over Ma commented that she'd seen the plot coming once the plot catalyst happened, whereas I was so totally along for the ride that I don't think I even stopped to think about what was going to happen.
And you can't ask for much more than that from a movie.
yani's rating: 3 prawns out of 5
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