Anticipate Neill Blomkamp's District 9

From the South African director who was to direct the Halo movie. That fell apart and now, with Peter Jackson's help, has been given a decent budget to turn his short film, Alive in Joburg, into a feature.

"An extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth suddenly find a kindred spirit in a government agent that is exposed to their biotechnology. Hits theaters August 14th, 2009."

Alive in Joburg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxmiF5WCF1g

this looks cool

would it kill filmmakers to design a non-humanoid alien for once tho

ya looks cool imo

i am super amped about this

the site is pretty dope

http://d-9.com/

digging this (tentative)

super amped co-sign

http://mnuspreadslies.com/

really excited about seeing this

stoked

psyched

Altho less psyched after seeing second trailer. First really looked like they were doing something different, more of a think piece perhaps, but now it looks more like yer usual conspiracy thriller robot alien explosions fest.

I'm just excited about a new sc-fi flick that isn't a reboot of a previous franchise or a comic book or video game or toy line or whatever.

though slocki 100% otm about this:

would it kill filmmakers to design a non-humanoid alien for once tho

tbf a "think piece" approach seems way worse than just str8 sci fi action like no1 needs to be bludgeoned with real world parallels omg

also i think the robots look dooope

it looks kind of like an reverse version of V, which is cool

i didn't really mean just playing on the obvious "it's apartheid, stupid" parallels. just something a bit more subtle - sci-fi action flicks are ten a penny. but hey maybe they just loaded the trailer with all the whizz-bang stuff. xp.

tbf a "think piece" approach seems way worse than just str8 sci fi action like no1 needs to be bludgeoned with real world parallels omg

^^^ this

speaking of "think piece", has anybody seen MOON?

though slocki 100% otm about this:

would it kill filmmakers to design a non-humanoid alien for once tho

― Attack Attack! and Philosophy (latebloomer), Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:02 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

knew you'd have my back on this

moon sucks kinda

tbf a "think piece" approach seems way worse than just str8 sci fi action like no1 needs to be bludgeoned with real world parallels omg

also i think the robots look dooope

― (Σx)² (Lamp), Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:04 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dunno, i kinda don't mind really obvious real-world parallels if they're not coy about it. maybe it's a brechtian scifi movie

or maybe im just sick to death of bullshit like transformers & terminator salvation and am happy that the filmmakers are even thinking about that shit beyond designing goldtoothed racist minstrelbots

i anticipate a lot of handheld camera. maybe it will be almost as good as children of men.

MOON starring Sam Rockwell, dir. Duncan Jones (aka Zowie Bowie, son of David)

ya im still not tired of high-concept conceit done low-budget style

i'm seeing moon on monday and i'm excited.

i thought peter jackson was directing district 9, but oh well, still looks cool.

I loved Moon!

Looking forward to this too.

petey jack is just producing but his name is bigger in the advertisements lol

or maybe im just sick to death of bullshit like transformers & terminator salvation and am happy that the filmmakers are even thinking about that shit beyond designing goldtoothed racist minstrelbots

naw i get u but the whole bsg DUCY shit~~~ i think the real problem w/ those movies is basic retarded characters not a lack of political awareness?

the problem with those movies is retarded everyone

all scifi is about today anyway, i really dont mind if ppl use it to make politically inflected shit, if it's done well. same with any genre.

it looks kind of like an reverse version of V, which is cool

Kinda reminded me of Alien Nation

I've been thinking that the whole time!

oh fyi goldtoothed racist minstrelbots is my fave guided by voices song a+ mention bro

haha

oh yeah forgot about Alien Nation

http://m.blog.hu/ko/kobli/image/aliennation.jpg

"Why are you humanoid again?"

o man james caan

probably not going to see this unless one of the aliens has a gold tooth and cant read

haha

--- SPOILER !!! --

its really more of a gold tentacle

this was pretty good! i had some problems (always bugs me when fake-docs break form shamelessly) but... i have to say... it worked for me. good alien stuff, they made it seemed believably... othered. latebloomer gonna like this.

a friend of mine did some of the early work on the creatures; she said it was a difficult project because the director is apparently quite an asshole and the deadlines were insane

really excited for this

there's a lot of cool smart details. and a lot of good icky stuff!

link to your review when it goes up

i'm actually interviewing the director on monday... will def link tho

i will ask him if he's quite an asshole

curious about this - hope its better than Alien Nation, to say the least

lol plz do, slocki!

this does look really good, be interested to read yr full review

there's nothing in the movie that legitimates that reading.

(contenderizer's)

i mean, are the cannibal-nigerians also putting on an act?

yes, they were all actors

I'd say "almost nothing". I thought that the Christopher Johnson character was intended to show us what the aliens were really like, beneath the pretense. But I agree that that read doesn't entirely hang together, and isn't well-supported by the film. After all, CJ was presented as smarter and more "human" than his fellows from the get-go. I suppose one might just as reasonably assume that the rest of them really ARE simpleminded drones fit only for cat food squabbling. That's not, however, the impression I got. The film's problem (if it is one) is that it's much more concerned with immersing you in the experience than in making any real, clear sense of it. As a result, the parts are all independently interesting, but they tend to disagree with one another. Could say the same thing about Inglourious Basterds, but I thought that film made a virtue of the dissonance.

came to the conclusion that the aliens' whole existence was a sort of minstrel show. They were putting on an act for their overseers, in order to defuse suspicion, fear and hostility, and also to delay the inevitable appropriation and exploitation of their technology. They were doing this in order to buy time to gather fuel for their escape, and also to ensure that they had something to escape in when the time came. Everything else was for show. Don't think that the movie is entirely clear on this point (plot was generally fulla holes), but I suspect that this is/was the general idea.

nah they're drones and without activity their hivemind devolves into pointless and destrcutive behaviour

c. johnson is maybe a step up, like an engineer class or something, and it had taken him 20 years to school himself into BRANE class and do something productive. (get the feeling he's been collecting the black gunk for no conscious reason for 10 years, then gradually getting smarter and more directed about it.)

PS that everyone thinks different things about the prawns' attitude and motivation is somethng GOOD about this film, not a failing

PS that everyone thinks different things about the prawns' attitude and motivation is somethng GOOD about this film, not a failing

― New Wavves

Fair point, though your theory regarding CJ's intellectual evolution is at least as assumptive as my take on the aliens' behavior overall. The fact that we don't really know isn't a failing. The film's slapdash plotting is (VdM and CJ breaking into and out of the death lab, f'rinstance).

Saying this as a fan. Loved the movie, but it had its faults.

if i had a superweaponhand i'd trash my enemy corporation's nearest office too, just sayin

Finally saw this - enjoyed it heaps. Not much to add except that for a $30 million film Weta and Image Engine absolutely knocked it out of the park in terms of fx, it looked fucking amazing.

He's only made one film, but it looks like Hollywood is already looking for the next Neill Blomkamp.
Apparently it's this guy: Fede Alvaraz. Not South African, but South American, and he's made a short sci-fi film in similar verite style to Blomkamp's 'Alive in Joburg'.

'Panic Attack!' isn't a patch on 'Joburg' imo, but Alvarez has already being mentored by Sam Rami (a la Peter Jackson with Blomkamp) on the strength of this vid, and is already on his way to making his first full $30mil feature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dadPWhEhVk

pretty cool i guess, but no where near as good as joburg

Saw this last night. Pretty damn awesome. The one thing that bugged me was the main bald arrogant military dude they kept showing being an abusive asshole to everyone and yet surviving the crazy mech and all the prawns and stuff until the very end. I guess that was a payoff seeing him eaten alive but still the way they kept delaying it felt a little forced.

Good movie though. Amazing visual effects.

i don't really watch films twice tbqh.

lol i just searched ilx for _the hurt locker_ and there was no thread on it. it's not sci-fi, but j/s, that film is way better, for examp.

― history mayne, Monday, 21 September 2009 14:24 (3 months ago)

Ha -- I just made this same comparison the kathryn bigelow thread but in favor of District 9!

By the way, I still like this movie but not as much as I did when I first posted to this thread; I do have to concede that the egregious plot holes weaken it in retrospect.

Bump.

Finally watched this for a second time, first time on DVD, last night, and, despite evil cold, thoroughly enjoyed it once again. Sure there are plot holes (how do they get to the MNU building) but I can forgive them for the set design and FX, the ideas on show, and Copley's performance - Wikus is the most appealing anti-hero.

Think I'll watch this with commentary today.

Wikus isn't really that appealing, though, is he?

Anyone who's shown laughing while babies burn within the first 10 minutes of a movie is always going to have a hard time redeeming himself, and Wikus never seemed to me to get there. He's a snivelling coward motivated entirely by self-interest - Christopher's escape to liberate the prawns is only a happy by-product of Wikus' desperation.

Having said that, Copley's performance is fantastic and entirely believable, and I really liked District 9.

Unlike you though, Nick, I felt the film's strength was in having the courage to make Wikus such an unappealing character instead of a boilerplate "good man in a bad situation".

Appealing to watch, rather than appealing in terms of character traits; he's so desperately out of depth in every area of his life that I am compelled to feel a little sorry for him.

Wikus is a weak man in an awful situation who eventually, whether by dint of an emotional maturation or by physiological (& presumably psychological / mental) change, does something selfless. It may be the alien part taking over his personality and survival instinct (survival of species outweighing survival of self), or it may be that he does grow a pair and a conscience.

totally agree with nick here, it's a much better character arc than most sci-fi movies i've seen lately

Interesting deleted scene; interview with MNU chief exec who says "it's not their ship, we know because we've taken the aliens onto the ship to help us and they don't understand it, they don't understand the technology; they are either slaves or pirates. When they arrived here, remember, they were destitute."

i've been on a ferry lots of times, but i couldn't drive a ferry- thta would be the first reading i'd make of that. MNU execs just being dense/happy to assume the aliens are stupid?

Possibly deliberate obfuscation to avert guilt.

Blomkamp saying it wasn't meant to be explicitly political, though reresentative of xenophobia in general and vaguely towards Zimbabweans; during shooting there was a spate of South African-on-Zimbabwean murders in Jberg, and he apologises for it seeming a clumsy comment on that.

Wikus meant to be anal bureaucrat and "passive racist".

yeah, and that's how i'd read wikus' attitude at the start of the film too- deliberately playing up his 'no big deal' attitude towards popping th eegg shack, for instance- just a decent shorthand way of underlining how the aliens are viewed by humans.

xp

Also he clearly just fucking loves putting aliens onscreen.

Meant to convey horrific, polluted, dirty reality of living in an S African township; asbestos everywhere.

"Bad Star Wars" he keeps saying. REALLY loves visualising aliens and Nigerians with alie weapons.

Real cow in the egg shack.

One art director's job was just to find animal corpses they could use.

Just explicitly stated that the aliens are a drone society like a termite hive.

They have a queen, generals, philosophers, etc, and workers.

Their queen is dead; decision over heirarchy of society informed insect-like design. Human-like face chosen for empathy.

"you can see it's sentient but you wouldn't wanna sit next to one on the bus"

Loves the question of whether Wikus' change also affects his brain.

Nigerian gangsters are meant to be satirical and OTT; played by S Africans and a Malawian. Blomkamp apologises to anyone who feels offended.

Fell asleep for most of the rest; damn cold.

Wikus is a weak man in an awful situation who eventually, whether by dint of an emotional maturation or by physiological (& presumably psychological / mental) change, does something selfless. It may be the alien part taking over his personality and survival instinct (survival of species outweighing survival of self), or it may be that he does grow a pair and a conscience.

Blomkamp says he hopes people pick up on this question; yay me, yay him.

At one point talking about the battlesuit he mentions Battletech = ubergeek.

I thought this was very entertaining and not too heavy-handed for sci-fi.

I HAVE FINALLY SEEN THIS FILM.

On the Wikus character transformation thing - it seems to me like he is set up to be a fairly decent sort from the word go, even if he is unreflexively doing a bad job. We do see him early on telling the soldiers not to start shooting, say, and even before he has converted that much we see him being very loth to shoot oen of the living aliens.

I was also wondering whether he is that much of a weak person form the get go... his willingness to go along with the MNU programme seemed to be as much to do with not really thinking about things too much rather than being a weak "just following orders" kind of guy. It struck me that he might also have been a creepily ambitious salaryman - working away like billyo in the office, shacking up with the boss's daughter, keenly trying to get ahead. OK so he comes across like a bit of a doofus nerd, but maybe that's what you need to be like to succeed in officeland (cf my career).

ho ho, my typos make me look like I am slipping into a faux afrikans accent.

i couldn't stop doing faux afrikaans iccents after watching this. it took days to wear off.

Fock!

"Da machines aw spreengeeng intu laf"

(they don't actually say that in District 9, but it's a "Play it again, Sam"/"Elementary my dear Watson" moment for me)

imagine the accent fun we could be having if the spaceship had gone to Birmingham rather than Johannesburg!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skizz

^^^ based in Birmingham

You're right. There's a huge market for alien-based films set in LOL accent places.

"From the director of District 9"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1823672/