District 9
I haven't seen Avatar, nor do I wish to, really. I'm not a Cameron hater - indeed I think his best film is The Abyss, despite it's relative market failure and tainted production story. What really turned me off was the push for 3D - just today Samsung, inc, on facebook, asked me to become a fan of their 3D televisions. 3D, i'm told, is the next plasma, the next flatscreen-600Mhz-truefilm-ultrablack-megapixel-thingymaduber.
Sadly, I can't currently see in three dimensions, and at 42, I expect my brain is too trained. So I passed on the big blue alien movie - though Sam Worthington is pretty and so is Zoe Saladana.
Oscar talk is big at work these days - along with LOST. So I repeated my claim that District 9 is one of the finest science fiction films of the last decade. No, i don't have an exhaustive list and no, i haven't seen every science fiction film made in the last ten years. Star Trek was terrific, Danny Boyle's Sunshine was a by the numbers drive down spaceship wonder/space terror lane - Children of Men is right up there IMHO.
I was asked rather heatedly why - and this is kinda, three days later and with more thought, my reply - no one at work reads my blog or is on my facebook list.
3District 9 is fantastic because it does what good scifi does - it takes one idea and pushes it right through your expectations and your comfort zone.
Aliens land - and are, well - alien. We don't know how, or why - we don't see or hear much in the way of physiology lessons (male? Female?) - or technobabble about shiny guns and zoomy ships - instead of falling into explanatory traps and comfy humanizations of alien culture (which itself is probably a human conceit) - District 9 simply says "how do humans usually act towards different minorities?" The answer is an ugly, sprawling slum - violence and images disturbingly close to plain 'ol human on human interaction.
So, just to make this even clearer, you toss Wikus (mr everyman) into the mess - an incomprehensible mess - and he is utterly, and literally transformed. Along the way, the aliens seem kinda more like us, but not enough to let us be comfortable with them - and the superevilcorporation guys seem both totally human in their acquisitiveness and alien in their disregard for other humans.
These are admirable ideas to ponder, and not especially new ones - what is remarkable about District 9 is that it doesn't answer ANY questions - just as Children of Men doesn't skewer itself on how or why are people not fertile - District 9 doesn't discuss why the aliens came, where they came from, what they want - it leaves us only with our reaction to their frankly unhuman actions.
District nine does have a lot of action - and is very 'splodey - but rather than just another episode of Orange Fireball Theater, this movie leaves you with more than burned retinas and ringing ears - it leaves you wondering - which is what the best science fiction does.
Sadly, I can't currently see in three dimensions, and at 42, I expect my brain is too trained. So I passed on the big blue alien movie - though Sam Worthington is pretty and so is Zoe Saladana.
Oscar talk is big at work these days - along with LOST. So I repeated my claim that District 9 is one of the finest science fiction films of the last decade. No, i don't have an exhaustive list and no, i haven't seen every science fiction film made in the last ten years. Star Trek was terrific, Danny Boyle's Sunshine was a by the numbers drive down spaceship wonder/space terror lane - Children of Men is right up there IMHO.
I was asked rather heatedly why - and this is kinda, three days later and with more thought, my reply - no one at work reads my blog or is on my facebook list.
3District 9 is fantastic because it does what good scifi does - it takes one idea and pushes it right through your expectations and your comfort zone.
Aliens land - and are, well - alien. We don't know how, or why - we don't see or hear much in the way of physiology lessons (male? Female?) - or technobabble about shiny guns and zoomy ships - instead of falling into explanatory traps and comfy humanizations of alien culture (which itself is probably a human conceit) - District 9 simply says "how do humans usually act towards different minorities?" The answer is an ugly, sprawling slum - violence and images disturbingly close to plain 'ol human on human interaction.
So, just to make this even clearer, you toss Wikus (mr everyman) into the mess - an incomprehensible mess - and he is utterly, and literally transformed. Along the way, the aliens seem kinda more like us, but not enough to let us be comfortable with them - and the superevilcorporation guys seem both totally human in their acquisitiveness and alien in their disregard for other humans.
These are admirable ideas to ponder, and not especially new ones - what is remarkable about District 9 is that it doesn't answer ANY questions - just as Children of Men doesn't skewer itself on how or why are people not fertile - District 9 doesn't discuss why the aliens came, where they came from, what they want - it leaves us only with our reaction to their frankly unhuman actions.
District nine does have a lot of action - and is very 'splodey - but rather than just another episode of Orange Fireball Theater, this movie leaves you with more than burned retinas and ringing ears - it leaves you wondering - which is what the best science fiction does.