District 9

Recently I saw a film. I’m gonna start off with a negative statement which means that inevitably I really liked it. By any objective measure the film was an unfocussed mash up of stolen ideas (he shoots) but by golly what a delightful riot it was (he scores).

The film on first impression was gonna be some too cool for school awesome batch of cleverness. I watch a bit and think “Uh-oh”. First there’s a crazy metaphor where the film makers take a concept in law, and made it literal. Then they took an idea from some other films (Cloverfield, Blair witch) and flogged it like some dead horse. The fact that that particular concept is already a bit dated and frankly trying too hard to be damn clever, started to irritate me after about 20 minutes. The lead character was a complete knob and a (literal) racist . He was fokking funny though. The whole thing was pootling along at an irritating pace, to be honest (it’s hard to move with a head up your arse).

Suddenly... (what a lazy way to change pace)

The filmmakers went “fuck this shit!” and stole with abandon from videogames and any 80s action movies they could think of and ran with it. It was brilliant. Seriously there was bits of Lethal Weapon, Aliens, Arnie Films, blowing shit up. The awesome stuff yar. And the whole thing stopped taking itself so seriously that it became better than all of the natty concept garbage could ever have lived up to.

It was as if the first ten pages of script was to con the moneymen that this megasmart lah-di-dah was worth funding and then just as the cash dudes had fallen off their chairs from their minds melting, all the really cool stuff was sneaked in afterwards. :-D

Okay it wasn’t all dumb. I loved how there was foreshadowing of really neat stuff. Late on a character manages to navigate a vehicle, and I thought- how’s this dumbass kid managed to do this? Then I realised that there was a hint earlier that the kid was a whizz. Then there was the metamorphosis. How does ingesting technology (specifically some arbitrary piece of tech, i.e. not designed for such things) cause an entire DNA set to be mutated? Stupid eh? Oh wait a minute the technology is intrinsically linked to the DNA, well I guess it does make sense! Also towards the end I realised how well the Blair Witch thing was used. It was just a macguffin to explain 20 years of history in a way that wasn’t too didactic, but needed to be said. A nice trick pulled off well.

Kudos, chaps