District 9

As for the hurt locker, it was pretty good. The action scenes were filmed flawlessly. But this *is* an action movie and it does use really some pretty stale tropes in terms of US troops relative to the Iraqis. All in all, action pretty amazing, the message/other stuff relatively heavy handed (i.e. he befriends a child? Really?). NOT as great as others are saying IMHO.

A friend pointed out that people are just really excited about it because it is the first halfway decent Iraq movie that has hit mainstream at all. I would say that's right.

It's cuz it's the first actual war movie on Iraq. Everything else has been dramas.

That's too bad seeing mellow reactions to District 9 and Hurt Locker. They're so damn good.

I thought it was good. The reviews pumped it up too much.

But it was MUCH better than the previews that were before the film. If they target previews for people who like the movie that was showing, I was getting really worried. Some stupid movie about college kids killing a girl (prank gone wrong), about a guy who sees everyone get killed, Saw VI....cripes! Not my kind of movies.

I can't believe that there are people here who thought that Star Trek was the best thing since sliced bread but didn't like District 9. Star Trek was a travesty blatantly exploiting great sci-fi, trying to give it a cool aesthetic by having the Beastie Boys and fast editing, but it still was a fundamentally flawed boring story that I felt like I had seen many times before.

The only similar movie in basic plot to District 9 (off the top of my head) is Alien Nation, and that was handled very differently with the aliens being competent citizens struggling to adjust to their new lives. District 9 is a lot like 12 Monkeys with bizarre stuff that you need to discuss with friends in order to come to terms with odd aspects of the plot. You can come up with explanations for most of the stuff if you want (and apparently there was more exposition that didn't make the final cut).

I happen to think that Star Trek was better than District 9 (by a wide margin as well). I think Star Trek is a 10/10 and District 9 is a 9.

That being said, both are absolutely fantastic movies. I look forward to sequels to both.

I had huge problems with Star Trek. First the supposed genius of this film is that it allows them to start from ground zero. Why not just get a new name and start from scratch like that? It doesn't seem like a sci-fi movie to me so much as an action movie. The actors did a good job (great even in some cases) but the script was awful. And the coincidences are off the chart. The first mission he gets on after training coincidentally runs into the same ship that killed his father, then he fights with spock and is randomnly chucked out of the ship onto any old planet, which just happens to be the same planet the original Spock is on, and Scotty?? Who is able to beam him on board the ship while it's in warp mode?? Ridiculous. I don't know why they even bothered to use the Star Trek title at all. If they just wanted to make an action movie in space why not call it something else?

I still want to see District 9 though.

Yeah, it's a sci-fi action movie to make the franchise more accessible instead of it being too sci-fi (which I prefer on paper but in reality it is the best Star Trek movie we've had since Wrath of Khan so go with it).

You'll much prefer District 9 then. I also took issue with the ridiculous coincidences in Star Trek but luckily it didn't debunk the adventure for me. I haven't seen it a 2nd time and that's when those types of things typically bug me more so we'll see. But yeah, see District 9, there is only one 'lucky' coincidence that might bug you but it's not as bad as randomly landing on a PLANET within walking distance of Spock's hideout cave. UGH


in other news I saw Ponyo last night and it was amazing. 9/10. Will make my top ten most likely.

Black Barney wrote:

I haven't seen it a 2nd time and that's when those types of things typically bug me more so we'll see.

That's what happened to me. I saw it once in the theater and thought it was o.k.. Not the Star Trek I know and love but so what, some good light fun. But then on a plane ride I thought why not watch it again, it's free. And then it struck me during the second viewing... I don't like this film at all.

Maybe I should have left it alone.

I like 1 & 2 the best personally. 1 is a nice slow actual sci-fi movie with pretty much no action, it feels like an old episode they forgot to air. 2 gives me as much action as I would want in a Star Trek film and pulls off the neat trick of never having the two main characters actually meet face to face. But it feels like they did.

First time through the series, Star Trek VI was my favourite. But upon rewatching it's almost as campy as Star Trek IV. Wrath of Khan really sticks out now as an AMAZING piece of filmmaking. The space battles are great as is the villan as is Kristie Alley, I just love it from start to finish.

Star Trek I is just too sci-fi for me (like 2001, Blade Runner and other heavy-handed sci-fi flicks).


Ok, thanks for the tip. I'll avoid seeing Star Trek (the latest one) a second time. I have a feeling it'll be a controversial entry into my top ten this year

I like to compare Star Trek and District 9 because I feel both have similar problems and strengths, but for some reason a day or two later I had dismissed Star Trek and District 9 keeps going up in my esteem.

Star Treks plot holes are ludicrous and no amount of fan invented explanation can save them. It suffers from the problem (which began in Batman Forever in spite of beliefs to the contrary) of action scenes with too much close up so that you don't get a good sense of the overall action. It also comes from a genre that has been done to death. There have been 10 other Star Trek movies, an insane amount of tv episodes, plus a huge number of imitators (eg Babylon 5). Plus it was intended to be relatively brainless to encourage mass market consumption, which will tend to mean that it just won't stand up to repeated viewing. The fact that people here have said that it doesn't really stand up to a second viewing seems to prove the point.

District 9 has a lot of ambiguity. I am sure that you can search the web to find some geek who has already analyzed it to death and can come up with explanations for all the ambiguities and plot holes (eg if they could get to the mothership and fly it away, why didn't do this years ago). However I have had a lot of fun with my wife discussing these things and coming up with possibilities so wouldn't want to read someone else's thoughts (just yet anyway). The film I think it can most be compared to is Blade Runner. Blade Runner received fairly mixed reviews when it came out but over time it has since come to be loved for its ambiguities. Plus the action scenes in District 9 retain the right balance in shots so they aren't confusing, it is part of a sub-genre of sci-fi that has barely been touched (unlike say post-apocalyptic, alien invasion or spaceship crew films and tv series), and has a lot of intelligence in it to boot.

I have no doubt that in 5 years time we will have forgotten about Star Trek and District 9 will be regarded as the seminal sci-fi film of the last 10 years (in the way that only 12 Monkeys and Gattaca were any good in between T2 and The Matrix).

I have to disagree...I think the "ambiguities" are largely the product of a lazy, patchy at best screenplay that simply relies too heavily on audience acceptance of absurdities that are not part of some implied untold or off-stage story as many seem to want to believe they are.

For example, does it make any sense to you that a group of what, 50 or so Nigerian crooks could pretty much run District 9 when there's 2.5 million bigger and meaner aliens there? Doesn't make sense, does it? And why would 2.5 million aliens simply let themselves get pushed around and why the hell would they care about Earth laws and administration? Oh, but maybe that cat food is like crack and it lulls them into docile complacency, right? OK, well, there's another assumption that you either buy into or the whole story falls apart. And the whole "they're workers/drones" thing doesn't hold up, because they're revealed to be hostile and aggressive when attacked. And what about the rest of the world, are they simply ignoring the fact that there's all these aliens in Johannesburg? How is it that South Africa appears to be the only nation involved whatsoever with the events described in the picture? Even MNU seems to be completely staffed and run by South Africans.

I also think that a lot of it kind of had the same problem as X-FILES did in its later seasons..."let's write this now, and explain it later". That does not fly in a feature film. THE MATRIX did that, but they had the whole story mapped up from the first pitch- yet they still made the first film mostly self-sufficent and it stands alone. DISTRICT 9 relies on the assumption that there's going to be a sequel to patch up all the lazy screenwriting. Like the whole thing with Christopher somehow needing three years to do whatever it is he was going to do. Makes no sense, and makes that story point completely dependent on a sequel. I'd bet you pickles to prawns that the answer to that question isn't even written yet. After its success at the box office last week, they're probably just now starting to think about it.

The initial impact of the film is great because it is something different. However, even after less than a week of thinking about I'm realizing that I like the film a lot less than I want to. It has more in common with Critters than it does with the great 80s SF films it's being compared to, and as for its "smart" screenplay...there's more sophisticated treatment of race and class in a very special episode of DIFF'RENT STROKES. It seems like the standards for what an "intelligent" SF picture is supposed to be have been dramatically lowered since the pre-STAR WARS days of films like 2001 and SOLARIS.

Frankly, I think the film was at its best when it was a dumb action picture. The director can do great action on a shoestring, and knows how to pace and frame exciting scenes. The last 20 minutes or so was the best part because it let the silly pretense that the film was about something important go and focused more on visceral pleasures.

STAR TREK was unpretentious, balls-to-the-wall fun. I didn't feel like it was trying to impress me with political messages that are 20 or 30 years past their relevancy.

BTW- BLADE RUNNER is my all-time favorite film. There is nothing ambiguous in it at all other than a hazy sense of morality, I'm not really quite sure what you're alluding to. If it's the whole "is Deckard a replicant" thing, I think that's pretty obvious in every cut since the first director's cut from 1992.

Michael Barnes wrote:

BTW- BLADE RUNNER is my all-time favorite film. There is nothing ambiguous in it at all other than a hazy sense of morality, I'm not really quite sure what you're alluding to. If it's the whole "is Deckard a replicant" thing, I think that's pretty obvious in every cut since the first director's cut from 1992.

-Why is everyone leaving the planet?
-Why is everyone obsessed with animals?
-Why aren't replicants allowed on earth?

That is off the top of my head. Some of the explanations are in the book (eg the obsession with animals), but that is outside the source material. Blade Runner is my number 2 film of all time after 'Heat'. I actually wonder if there is some cultural thing going on with District 9 as from a quick snapshot of the sites I frequent most American geeks seem to rate it a 7, but geeks in other parts of the world give it 10s.

Ah, I see what you're saying and I'l buy that those things could be under-explained to some viewers...I guess I don't consider those things ambiguous in that those are all backgrounded and not really critical to the functioning of the plot. The difference with DISTRICT 9 is that the "ambiguous" elements in it are really rather crucial for the plot and the events of the film to make sense. In BLADE RUNNER, it doesn't really matter why everyone is leaving- the advert for the offworld colonies conveys a lot of that, as does the overcrowded and destitute city-scape. As for the animals, it could be that I'm so intimately familiar with the story (book and film) that it's obvious...and also that I'm an animal person so it makes sense to me that real animals have become increasingly rare and sought after, as well as their simulacra. And the law against replicants on earth...that's kind of self-explanatory given the events in the film!

I wonder if part of it may be what is quickly becoming something too common- the whole LOST effect on narrative. Make it intentionally mysterious to string audiences along and give just enough of a story laden with clues so that the audience is expected to do the heavy lifting and make it all coherent. I think that's kind of bullshit. There's a big difference between real, enigmatic and meaningful ambiguity and bullshit. I really think that a lot of the "missing links" in DISTRICT 9 fall into the bullshit category.

HEAT is a great picture, we can definitely get together on that one!

Michael Barnes wrote:

...there's more sophisticated treatment of race and class in a very special episode of DIFF'RENT STROKES.

Whatchoo talkin' bout, Willis?

I always think of the very special "just say no" episode starring Nancy Reagan...I often thought about it at the Melk Weg in Amsterdam trying hash brownies.