Yesterday afternoon David and I met up with our friends Ollie and Caleb for a late afternoon showing of District 9 — a movie I’ve been dying to see for months now! The buzz about this film has been building for weeks now and I’ve only heard great things … but I did my best to stay away from any spoilers that might ruin the film for me before seeing it. The movie was featured on the cover of Entertainment Weekly magazine last week and hinted at a huge plot development that I didn’t want to know beforehand … from that moment on, I kept well away from all things District 9 until I could see the movie for myself. BE WARNED that my review below will contain spoilers of the movie so DO NOT READ IT if you want to remain unspoiled. In short, I loved the film and think many of y’all will love it, too:
Yes, District 9 lives up to the hype and is a very excellent movie … that being said, it works very well because of the involvement of Peter Jackson who produced the film and knows how to tell a tale with FX and make it look believable. To be honest, the best things about this film have been inspired by previous sci-fi movies and TV shows and owes a lot of its success to those films/movies. District 9 has shades of the films Enemy Mine (but set on Earth) and Starship Troopers (but in a serious way) and is similar to the TV shows Alien Nation (but set in South Africa and more gritty) and V (without the aliens having an advantage). Altho the film borrows from earlier projects, it does tell a mostly unique tale of its own in a very believable manner. There were a few plot developments that I hated but overall I loved the tale of a massive spaceship full of grotesque-looking refugee aliens being stranded on our planet. As you start to empathize with the aliens, or prawns as they are called in the film, you start to truly understand the brutality of the human race. To be completely honest, the sorts of things you see in the film would most likely happen on some scale if ever the same circumstance were to happen in real life (tho, I contend the US would have a great role in the exploitation … you know, should an alien race take refuge here on planet Earth, that is). The movie is much more than an alien movie … it’s a great commentary on social inequality. The ending leaves the movie wide open for a sequel, prolly called District 10, with will likely hit theaters in 3 years. District 9 is deffo one of my fave films of the year thus far.
After the movie, we made our way to Kitchen 24 in Hollywood for dinner and drinks and ended up calling it an early night. I fell asleep while reading last night. This afternoon, I’m making my way down to Huntington Beach to see Darion play beach volleyball for charity in shorty shorts. I’ll do my best to come back with photos :)
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