District 9 - Review, Discuss, Commentary ***SPOILERS*** possible

I thought it was pretty unique, I liked it. Alien military suit was pretty cool.
Cool weaponry too, no such thing as just a flesh wound with those things.

 

Someone put it nicely up-thread that the alien technology in this movie, and really the "look of the movie" felt like Half-Life.

I did think that it was odd that the alien technology (most notably the Mecha and the shuttle (that sort-of looked like Serenity) was so vulnerable to human weapons.

 

I actually liked that part. It gives more credence to the idea that they didn't have so much of an advantage that they could have taken on humanity right off the bat, especially since most of them were sickly and would be more than willing to sacrifice their technology for catfood.

 

It was only made of metal and if you hit the stuff hard enough it gets damaged. Now if they had shields it would be a different story.

I just saw it today, fantastic movie.

 

Well I daresay that most, if not all people disagree with you.

Saw it Friday night.

Excellent film.

 

I hope there'll be a District 10 sequel.

 

Christopher did say he'd be back in 3 years.

 

I like how "prawns" is a tag.

 

^ Speaking of prawns. If there is a sequel, with Christopher returning, it had better star this guy as the King Prawn:

Spoiler: The King Prawn

Just sayin'

 

Excellent. By far it was the best sci-fi flick I've seen this year so far.

 

I'm wavering between Above Average and Excellent after seeing it on Saturday. I have nitpicking criticisms, but there was also a lot I liked.

I voted Above Average, but I'll elaborate a little later.

 

Would you be willing to watch it again?

 

Sure there is, you just have to redefine 'flesh wound' to mean all your flesh is torn from your body.

 

Yes. In fact I'm interested in the DVD when it's released.

The nitpicks I have do not detract from what I thought was a very well done work overall. The nitpicks are more in the manner of what I feel were loose threads, nothing truly substantial or distracting but there nonetheless.

I'm trying to think of what I can say without spilling too many beans for those who haven't seen it yet. I've already reccommended the film to four people today at work.

 

Very cool weapons, although it does raise a significant question: if you've got that kind of weaponry at hand then how do you allow yourself to be so victimized?


After seeing some of the remarks in this thread (and published reviews) I don't think I'm really giving anything away, so here goes.

I’ve seen four SF related films so far this year. Terminator Salvation was competent—it wasn’t awesome, but it didn’t suck either. Star Trek ’09 was simply pure garbage without one redeeming thing about it. The Keannu Reeves The Day The Earth Stood Still remake was also irredeemable in every respect. I’ve still yet to see Moon which still interests me.

Now along comes District 9. It isn’t above criticism, but from what I see those criticisms mostly amount to nitpicking. This is a smart film in many ways.

Right off I can see how this was made for so little. It isn’t that it looks cheap—quite the contrary—but the money was used wisely. Money wasn’t spent needlessly on big name actors for one thing. There’s very much something of a well used army surplus look to the film. Camera motion, long shots, objects blurred by distance and a host of other cleverly used techniques (part of the documentary style) also allowed them to engage viewer imagination to envision detail that may or may not have been there. And most everything looks worn and dirtied which also serves to obscure detail.

But it’s the story and the ideas involved that sets this film apart from so much else, and it isn’t just making the alien Prawns sympathetic. Throughout history humans have easily managed to brutalize each other particularly those perceived different and apart from a more favoured group. So it’s easy to see how humans could conceivably treat alien life forms in much the same way under the right circumstances.

I’ve read and seen a lot of SF over the years and so perhaps it wasn’t all that hard for me to sympathize with the aliens even though I found them repulsive. And by the end of the film while I was getting used to their appearance I still found them repulsive. That said the question is whether someone with less extensive exposure to SF would respond the same way I did while watching this film. It certainly didn’t take me long to take a very dim view of the humans’ cold and calculating abuse of the Prawns

This was one of the key elements in the smart approach in this film. The aliens aren’t aggressors and neither are they cute and cuddly orphans. They are victims of circumstance who are at a disadvantage and who just happen to look like something many of us would have no hesitation in squashing underfoot. They don’t act exactly like us and they never speak English (although how the few humans speaking to the Prawns understand them is beyond me, but it was cleverly done). Broadly speaking this is much like The Planet Of The Apes only with the human and alien situations reversed.

Indeed the Prawns are one of the most effective depictions of alien I’ve ever seen in SF in the visual mediums. They looked and moved and spoke(?) convincingly. I could quibble with them being bipedal and of having familiar bilateral symetry, but I suppose the producers felt there had to be something identifiable about them.

After seeing the Pawns so mistreated I’m not sure I developed much real sympathy for the central human character. He starts off as a hypocritical piece of crap and never progresses much beyond that even when he starts to see things from the Prawns’ perspective because of his metamorphosis.

My only real quibble with this film is a technical one: if the alien mothership is so depleted of power then what the hell is holding the thing suspended above the city? And if the aliens had such effective weaponry then how did they manage to allow themselves to be in such a disadvantaged circumstance at our hands? On the second point I can only speculate that perhaps while they may look so loathsome (to us) they are not overly aggressive by nature. Of course maybe I’m just reaching here, but it struck me the Prawns meant no real animosity towards humans in general and mostly just wanted to be left alone. Perhaps they came to Earth out of simple desperation. Christopher’s remark that he’d return in three years strongly infers that they have some form of FTL stardrive capability, another question mark in regard to how someone with such advanced tech over us could be so victimized.

This film does avoid other questions: Where did the Prawns come from? How did they find themselves in such desperate circumstances that brought them here? There were over a million of them aboard so was this a colony ship or what? Where were the sympathizers to the Prawns’ situation (and you know there had to be at least some although they were never seen). Will the Prawn Christopher return as promised yet as a rescue expedition or a retaliatory one?

Some of those questions don’t really matter because the point of this film was to make you think and ask yourself questions. In that I think this film was effective. I’ll be interested to see what extras and what deleted scenes (if any) the DVD will have. This one is definitely one I’ll pick up.

 

Spoiler: Spoilers

It is a good question, but you have to remember how 'first contact' was made. The humans cut into the ship because it hadn't done anything for months, the aliens were all just wondering about inside, sick and starving. They weren't exactly in shape to fight back, and given that kind of start, with the humans having such an upper hand right off the bat, I don't think it would have been very feasible to fight back later on either. I'm sure that the first Prawn who tried anything got his head blown off and the rest fell in line pretty quickly.

If that doesn't convince you just think back to the end of the movie where the security Colonel went up against the Prawns. He had powerful weapons, they had their bare hands... its just that they had more hands than he could handle, even with his gun. Same thing goes for how the Prawns managed to become victims of the less advanced humans

 

^^ Well said. And you make sense.

My feeling is that whatever the circumstances that led to it the Prawns were perhaps refugees of some kind.

I still have a big question mark over how the goo that infected the MNU guy just also happened to be the substance they needed for fuel. That didn't detract from me enjoying the film, but it didn't make much sense to me either.