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District 9 is a Peter Jackson presentation,
which I find strange. It was directed by Neill Blomkamp. The film starts
with a short history of events that lead up to the present. In 1982, a
large ship turns up hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. After three
months of waiting for something to happen, they decide to cut the ships hull and
see what's going on. They find millions of aliens who were in a very bad
way and decide to allow them to live in the city but, because they are aliens,
they knew that they probably would have advanced technology. So they build
a slum just for the aliens and that was called District 9
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The main
protagonist is called Wikus van de Merwe. He works for a private
organisation called MNU. He is a field operative that has been
assigned the task of relocating the prawns as he calls them to a new
district, about two hundred kilo meters away from the city.
I always thought it strange that he called them prawns,
because they seemed to look more like pray mantis to me; but what would I
know. |
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So off he
goes to do his job in relocating the Prawns. I don't recall them ever
using the real name for the species, even though they seem to be able to
communicate with them. Wikus walks into one of the shacks and
finds a cylinder that one of the aliens has been working on and some black
substance sprays into his face. My first reaction was that it was a
virus and would kill off the population. I've been watching far too
many B movies for my own good. |
Everything seems relatively OK, until Wikus starts to
get sick and a black substance starts to trickle out of his nose. Later on
when he gets back home, his father in-law who got him this promotion, starts to
have a go at him and he throws up. He is taken to hospital and that is
where I will leave it here. I have probably told you too much already and
this point in the film is probably one fifth of the way through so far.
So what did I think of this movie? This may sound
strange but, whenever I am hyped about a movie, or it has been given resounding
reviews by the public, I tend to enjoy it less. Not that the movies isn't
good; it's just that my expectations become far higher than it should be. When
I see that large amounts of people say that this is the best movie of the year,
my expectations goes through the roof.
Let's get one thing straight; this is not the best
movie of the year that I have seen. I still think that Star Trek the Movie
was a better film. This movie is very dark and some people compare it to
apartheid in South Africa. I would have compared it to the prisons camps
from Germany in the second world war. The aliens were treated more like
the Jews than the black South Africans in the eighties. The film
made fun of the black South Africans, who were too stupid to realise that they
were treating the aliens,exactly the same way that the white South Africans had
treated them.
It did feel like a First Person Shooter after a while,
especially when Wikus had picked up an
alien weapon. For some reason, I was expecting him to become silent and a
certain track to start playing. Half Life, I'm looking at you!
The film does take a twist that turns it from a storm
trooper movie into something that makes sense, but at the same time is rather
strange. I would say that the movies is OK and only OK. The
characters do the best they can, considering that the actor who plays
Wikus, has never been in a professional role before,
does a good job and is convincing.
I would suggest you go into this film with low
expectations, because you will enjoy it more and you will be pleasantly
surprised.
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