(Untitled)

[lokiect]

for the record, District 9 was not the movie for me. Wow. Aside from the unpleasant body stuff, everyone is an idiot! the only likable characters are the 2 main aliens, and the whole story hinges on one of them being kind of illogical in the first place! Can't we have any characters grow during the film

Comments

[thomasyan]

I also thought it was over-rated. But the marketing campaign was reasonably clever, the special effects were very good, the alien kid was cute, and the plot wasn't totally stupid.

I did like the movie well enough to wonder if the Halo movie would have been good. (When that movie fell through, Peter Jackson asked the director if he still wanted to make a movie, and that was how District 9 came to be.)

Did you see Up? That was fun, and had an Asian kid. But apparently the writers felt that the only interesting woman, who was quite interesting, had to get killed off early on to motivate the rest of movie.

[lokiect]

yeah, the marketing campaign made it sound like a good movie!
ian's totally right, it should have been a campy b movie! it's a shame they didn't play it that way, it coooouuuuuld have been really entertaining that way! and they wouldn't have needed to do anything like character development.

But there was just so much wasted potential! There were all these things I thought could have been interesting that didn't get touched and instead we get focused on the idiot and the nameless corporate/military/gang villians. Why did the aliens do any of what they did? Why did the humans know how to understand the alien language but not a thing about what had happened to them? Why was there such a clear lack of cooperation between the humans and aliens, at least in terms of getting them back to the ship? (my answer is that they didn't know how to do any of those things and still make the movie go where they wanted it to)

[echidnapi]

And of course they couldn't try to do anything interesting, because half the movie was some crazy super long ultra violent shootout.

[ghudson]

I thought it mostly interesting in comparison to Avatar. Both movies had amazing visuals, but District 9 had a much smaller budget. While Avatar was comically black and white, District 9 was muddy and gray (probably to a fault).

Anyway, I think it sold mostly on special effects.

[lokiect]

ah. I haven't seen avatar yet. I just couldn't get myself to care. But that helps put the movie into perspective.