Good (shrimp) job!
Just saw the best sci-fi movie I've seen in years: District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp (and co-written by him and Terri Tatchell).
Almost 2 million aliens (who look like humanoid shrimp, hence the racial epithet hurled against them by humans: "prawns") in a refugee camp (the District 9 of the title) in Johannesburg?
Corporate villainy in the presence of MNU, Multi-National United, which has quite a large paramilitary -- err, "private security" -- division? Summary and at best semi-legal eviction notices served to the extra-terrestrials to shove them further into South Africa's hinterland, with the blessing of the vocal majority of Jo'berg's residents? Nigerian gangsters? Human attempts to reverse engineer the various devices that fell from the hovering mothership, most particularly the weapons? Furious attempts to work around the bio-locks that the aliens have built into their weapons, which prevents humans from being able to use them? Accidental genetic mutation? Mecha? A cute lil' mini-BEM? A father-in-law from hell?
List the plot elements like that, and it sounds like another dime-a-dozen genre movie. It shouldn't be more than dumb fun, with more emphasis on the "dumb" than on the "fun," except for the most undemanding sf or action movie fan.
But it works.
I. Mean. Gah. Damn. Does it ever work.
It's worth seeing on a big screen, but it shouldn't lose too much on a decent-sized TV screen, as long as the image is letterboxed. As a novel, it would only be decent at best; as a movie, it's just this side of phenomenal, which should give the uninitiated a clue as to how much dreck science fiction fans have had to swallow in their movies.
Yes, the ending is left open enough for a sequel or two; but I kind of hope that some cable channel picks it up as a TV series and treats the movie as the pilot (and maybe releases the season finales to the theatres..? hey, I can dream): that way they can get some honest-to-Clarion character development going on instead of "mere" reasonably intelligent thrills, suspense and righteous indignation.
Almost 2 million aliens (who look like humanoid shrimp, hence the racial epithet hurled against them by humans: "prawns") in a refugee camp (the District 9 of the title) in Johannesburg?
Corporate villainy in the presence of MNU, Multi-National United, which has quite a large paramilitary -- err, "private security" -- division? Summary and at best semi-legal eviction notices served to the extra-terrestrials to shove them further into South Africa's hinterland, with the blessing of the vocal majority of Jo'berg's residents? Nigerian gangsters? Human attempts to reverse engineer the various devices that fell from the hovering mothership, most particularly the weapons? Furious attempts to work around the bio-locks that the aliens have built into their weapons, which prevents humans from being able to use them? Accidental genetic mutation? Mecha? A cute lil' mini-BEM? A father-in-law from hell?
List the plot elements like that, and it sounds like another dime-a-dozen genre movie. It shouldn't be more than dumb fun, with more emphasis on the "dumb" than on the "fun," except for the most undemanding sf or action movie fan.
But it works.
I. Mean. Gah. Damn. Does it ever work.
It's worth seeing on a big screen, but it shouldn't lose too much on a decent-sized TV screen, as long as the image is letterboxed. As a novel, it would only be decent at best; as a movie, it's just this side of phenomenal, which should give the uninitiated a clue as to how much dreck science fiction fans have had to swallow in their movies.
Yes, the ending is left open enough for a sequel or two; but I kind of hope that some cable channel picks it up as a TV series and treats the movie as the pilot (and maybe releases the season finales to the theatres..? hey, I can dream): that way they can get some honest-to-Clarion character development going on instead of "mere" reasonably intelligent thrills, suspense and righteous indignation.