I just got back from it and my head is still reeling. This film packs such a punch that I'm gonna have to recuperate before I can post at any length about it. For now I'll just say that I'd be hard pressed to name a better sci-fi film. It's profoundly disturbing in the best possible way.
Go see it.
District 9
-
Hachimitsu
- Formerly Wilma
- Posts: 942
- Joined: Fri Dec 02, 2005 1:36 pm
- Location: Canada
- Contact:
-
Angbasdil
- The man, the myth, the monkey.
- Posts: 606
- Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2005 5:37 am
- Location: Woodstock GA
Wilma,
If you're planning to see it anyway, don't read this. Just go. But if you're not sure and want me to tell you why you should see it, here's a mostly spoiler free review. I'll talk about the major themes the film deals with, but not the story details.
Peter Jackson produced it. The director is Neill Blomkamp, and this is his first full length film. He gained a lot of attention (including PJ's) with some short films, and PJ was going to have him direct his film of the videogame Halo. Fortunately (in retrospect), that project fell through and he and PJ did this one instead. The budget was only $30M.
The film begins in a faux documentary style, recounting the arrival of an alien vessel over Johannesburg, South Africa. The aliens are stranded, in poor health and low on supplies. A multinational organization is put together to deal with the extraterrestrial refugees, who end up in a camp (a slum basically), the titular District 9. Tensions rise between the "prawns", as they are derisively nicknamed, and the locals, until a new camp is built far from the city and a civilian contractor is hired to forcibly evacuate the prawns to District 10.
This is about 15-20 minutes into the film, at which point it begins to intercut between the documentary style and a more traditional style. The transitions are seamless in the moment, but very effective in making the whole film seem real, like a piece of history. But that's not the important thing about this film. What's important is how the story unfolds from here on out. I called it "profoundly disturbing" earlier, and it is. It grabs your attention and yanks you right out of your comfort zone, making you think and feel things that you probably didn't want to think and feel. But you probably should anyway. Even now, after a good night's sleep , I still can't put words to it very well.
But I'll try.
D9 isn't just a great sci-fi film. It's a great film. But the sci-fi part is important. because what sci-fi is supposed to do is show a world that almost, but not quite, reflects our own. See, we know what we think about our present reality. We carry preconceived ideas and assumptions (schemas, to be geeky about it) that color our judgement. So when someone show us a reality like our own, we judge it based on what we already know (or think we know). But sci-fi allows the storyteller to show us a reality that is different enough from our own that our prejudices don't quite fit, but still be close enough to show us something about ourselves. D9 is hands down the best example I personally can think of for a film doing this. Just be forewarned, what it shows us about ourselves isn't very pretty. The humans really aren't the good guys here. And the thing is, no reasonably informed person can look at how the characters behave and tell themselves that people just wouldn't do that. Because people have done that. They've done exactly that. To other people, no less. You seriously think that we, as species, would treat a bunch of giant bugs from outer space better than we've treated other people? Not likely.
And yet somehow this little film manages to not be preachy or heavy-handed. Yes, it's violent, even gory. But none of it is gratuitous. The camera, like the story, never blinks, never flinches, never yields an inch. It simply shows us a very real possibility, I think the probability, of how we would act under these hypothetical circumstances. And as much as I'd like to believe Blomkamp is wrong, I can't quite make myself believe that. History just doesn't bear it out.
If you're planning to see it anyway, don't read this. Just go. But if you're not sure and want me to tell you why you should see it, here's a mostly spoiler free review. I'll talk about the major themes the film deals with, but not the story details.
Peter Jackson produced it. The director is Neill Blomkamp, and this is his first full length film. He gained a lot of attention (including PJ's) with some short films, and PJ was going to have him direct his film of the videogame Halo. Fortunately (in retrospect), that project fell through and he and PJ did this one instead. The budget was only $30M.
The film begins in a faux documentary style, recounting the arrival of an alien vessel over Johannesburg, South Africa. The aliens are stranded, in poor health and low on supplies. A multinational organization is put together to deal with the extraterrestrial refugees, who end up in a camp (a slum basically), the titular District 9. Tensions rise between the "prawns", as they are derisively nicknamed, and the locals, until a new camp is built far from the city and a civilian contractor is hired to forcibly evacuate the prawns to District 10.
This is about 15-20 minutes into the film, at which point it begins to intercut between the documentary style and a more traditional style. The transitions are seamless in the moment, but very effective in making the whole film seem real, like a piece of history. But that's not the important thing about this film. What's important is how the story unfolds from here on out. I called it "profoundly disturbing" earlier, and it is. It grabs your attention and yanks you right out of your comfort zone, making you think and feel things that you probably didn't want to think and feel. But you probably should anyway. Even now, after a good night's sleep , I still can't put words to it very well.
But I'll try.
D9 isn't just a great sci-fi film. It's a great film. But the sci-fi part is important. because what sci-fi is supposed to do is show a world that almost, but not quite, reflects our own. See, we know what we think about our present reality. We carry preconceived ideas and assumptions (schemas, to be geeky about it) that color our judgement. So when someone show us a reality like our own, we judge it based on what we already know (or think we know). But sci-fi allows the storyteller to show us a reality that is different enough from our own that our prejudices don't quite fit, but still be close enough to show us something about ourselves. D9 is hands down the best example I personally can think of for a film doing this. Just be forewarned, what it shows us about ourselves isn't very pretty. The humans really aren't the good guys here. And the thing is, no reasonably informed person can look at how the characters behave and tell themselves that people just wouldn't do that. Because people have done that. They've done exactly that. To other people, no less. You seriously think that we, as species, would treat a bunch of giant bugs from outer space better than we've treated other people? Not likely.
And yet somehow this little film manages to not be preachy or heavy-handed. Yes, it's violent, even gory. But none of it is gratuitous. The camera, like the story, never blinks, never flinches, never yields an inch. It simply shows us a very real possibility, I think the probability, of how we would act under these hypothetical circumstances. And as much as I'd like to believe Blomkamp is wrong, I can't quite make myself believe that. History just doesn't bear it out.
-
Voronwë the Faithful
- At the intersection of here and now
- Posts: 46163
- Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:41 am
- Contact:
-
Primula Baggins
- Living in hope
- Posts: 40005
- Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:43 am
- Location: Sailing the luminiferous aether
- Contact:
My two cents, as a fellow reader of movie threads, is that this would be a good policy. Labeled nonspoiler threads can always be started separately. But that's just my opinion.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
-
Voronwë the Faithful
- At the intersection of here and now
- Posts: 46163
- Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:41 am
- Contact:
-
Primula Baggins
- Living in hope
- Posts: 40005
- Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:43 am
- Location: Sailing the luminiferous aether
- Contact:
Maintaining a spoiler-warning rule can really inhibit the flow of a discussion. I'm inclined to suggest that people who want nonspoiler discussion of a particular book or film or TV show should probably start a thread for it, so that people who just want to discuss the thing can do so freely.
Back when Babylon 5 was being broadcast for the first time, I regularly read the moderated Usenet newsgroup. Moderation was very unusual for Usenet, but because the show's creator, producer, and writer read and posted in that group, the moderation was for him, to prevent him from seeing story ideas posted by fans (which could lead to legal problems if he appeared to use any idea similar to a fan's in an actual episode). The mods also used it to maintain a level of civility and to keep spoilers out of the nonspoiler threads.
The point is, there were always nonspoiler and spoiler threads for each episode—and the spoiler threads had five times the traffic, IIRC.
Back when Babylon 5 was being broadcast for the first time, I regularly read the moderated Usenet newsgroup. Moderation was very unusual for Usenet, but because the show's creator, producer, and writer read and posted in that group, the moderation was for him, to prevent him from seeing story ideas posted by fans (which could lead to legal problems if he appeared to use any idea similar to a fan's in an actual episode). The mods also used it to maintain a level of civility and to keep spoilers out of the nonspoiler threads.
The point is, there were always nonspoiler and spoiler threads for each episode—and the spoiler threads had five times the traffic, IIRC.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
-
Primula Baggins
- Living in hope
- Posts: 40005
- Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:43 am
- Location: Sailing the luminiferous aether
- Contact:
I've been told by my filmhead son that I have to see it, but he agrees that I would do better seeing it on DVD. I can "hide" from DVDs more easily.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
When I left the cinema the first thought in my head was , this is so much better than Cloverfield. I mean there's room to compare the two- pseudo-actual footage that gradually succumbs to the rules of feature film cinematography for one. Thing was, in Cloverfield we were constantly reminded of the person behind the camera while in District 9 we never meet the cinematographer so it's much easier to forget that the documentary couldn't possibly have included certain shots featured in the film.
