Actors: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope
Director: Neill Blomkamp
District 9 asks a real simple question, and it asks it from its moderately inventive faux-documentary opening - What if aliens landed on Earth, and instead of being malevolent and powerful or all-knowing or beautiful, they turned out to be merely squatters? What would we do with them?
Unfortunately with such a solid setup, the film loses the ambiguity of the question along the way, shedding it for gore, propulsive action sequences, and black-and-white morality. It also employs a trick that I can only accept in science fiction films, coming up with one deus ex machina after another. That's the great thing about technology that never existed - all you have to do is invent it in the script, and voila. There's nothing Independence Day bad (the aliens don't use the same OS that we do), but the astute viewer is certainly left with a few questions.
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this was fun for awhile when i saw it. it got hokey
ReplyDeleteAgreed. It was a good setup – further complicated by its setting in the land of apartheid. The first twenty minutes were wonderful. The protagonist’s glee during the egg-popping abortions…wowzers.
ReplyDelete& I loved the scholars picking apart the incident. The disinterested armchair analysis that showed the great divide between scholarly interests and humane interests was the most biting element of the movie.
The ending statement describing the successful relocation of the prawns and the growth of the prawn concentration camp may have been more important to the plot than the preceding 40 minutes about our anti-hero.
And of course, it was a cheap shot to make us sympathize with the prawns by turning a human into a quadpraawn.