District 9 – review!

Naturally I had heard about this movie, but I was completely unprepared for what it was actually about! I had expected yet another documentary-style movie (which it is), but it is also so much more.

The film opens with a  series of interviews that introduce the story: twenty years earlier, an alien ship arrives above Johannesburg, South Africa. It hovers above the city for three months without any contact, but eventually humans go up and cut into the ship. They discover a large group of aliens who are malnourished and sick and they bring them down to a holding camp (district 9) which eventually turns into a slum.  Difficult relationships emerge between the population of Johannesburg and the aliens (which are referred to as ‘prawns’ by the locals.) Eventually the government bring in a task force to relocate the aliens to a different location, away from the city.

The head of the task force is Wikus van der Merwe. He is a type of bumbling geek (imagine a character from The Office, and you won’t be far off). He also has no respect for the 'prawns’, or their welfare. His only redeeming quality is that he has somehow managed to marry the beautiful daughter of his boss (which is also the only reason he was given the job).

While issuing eviction notices he finds a silver canister which then sprays him in the face with a black fluid. Immediately something is not quite right, and what follows is the type of transformation that takes place in the movie, The Fly. Wikus quickly gets sick and not long after discovers he has grown an alien arm.

Suddenly Wikus is the man everyone else wants. Because of his transformation he can work the alien weaponry that previously could only be used by the aliens, due to their DNA. He finds refuge in the only place he can, the alien slum. Here he strikes up a relationship with an alien called Christopher Johnson, who also has a small son.  Together they try to stop Wikus’s transformation and, in turn, find the fluid needed to get the aliens back home again.

I had expected this movie to be scary, but, even though it wasn’t (and wasn’t supposed to be), it was still a really good film.  I started the movie really disliking Wikus, but by the end I was really rooting for both him and the aliens.  The aliens at the start aren’t shown to be particularly intelligent or humanoid, but this is turned around by the introduction of Christopher and his son.  The bad guys are the government agency, and they really are horrible – conducting experiments on the aliens and even prepared to cut Wikus open while he was still conscious!

At some point during the movie it stops being in a documentary style and is just normal ‘movie-style’, but I didn’t notice when this happened, so I guess it worked well enough!  The start is a little slow, but it quickly sped up and then it is fast paced right through to the end.  It was also a really original storyline, and, as I said, not what I had expected.  I guess I had expected something more like Cloverfield, but it was completely different!

As with all Peter Jackson films, the effects were really good, and towards the end I could even see a bit of Avatar influence on the effects creeping in.

Overall, District 9 is a really good movie - even if it’s not scary!  Something Wicked 8/10.

 

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Aliens…Do you believe? And The Fourth Kind – a review.

As far as I am concerned the jury is out on the subject of aliens. It is just one of those things I can’t seem to make up my mind about. The scientific part of me says that the chance of there being another intelligent species out there some where is extremely high, but when I hear or read the reports of UFO’s being seen I am always sceptical. I guess it is more the idea that if there was another species out there who visited us then why wouldn’t they do more than just fly down over us for a few seconds before doing some aerial acrobatics and then flying away? If they are really intelligent wouldn’t they contact our own leader rather than abducting and doing strange experiments on the local hick/town drunk?

However, it is hard to ignore the facts.

There have been more than eleven million sightings of UFO’s and, as it points out in the movie, The Fourth Kind, anything else with that number of witnesses simply wouldn’t be questioned.

Here are some pieces of footage of UFO sighting. Most probably faked, but you never know?

Obviously most of these types of video footage are either faked or can be explained away, but there is still some part of me that questions the sheer volume of it. Isn’t it possible that hidden somewhere in the fake and fraudulent footage there might actually be something real?

In the movie, The Fourth Kind, they try to play on our need for reality. It is another movie where they use ‘actual archived footage’, and the movie is based around a series of real life disappearances that happened in Nome, Alaska, over a thirty year period.

Millia Jovovich ‘re-enacts’ footage of Nome psychiatrist Dr Abigail Tyler, who, during hypnosis sessions with her patients came to believe they were exhibiting behaviours that suggest contact with aliens. Each of her patients are suffering from sleep disturbances and all recall the same thing – seeing an owl that is not an owl and not being allowed to remember anything else. The producer uses a split screen to show us what happened, both in real life and during the re-enactment. The effect works well and there are some truly disturbing scenes. The woman who plays the ‘real’ Dr Tyler does actually look like she has been through some serious trauma in her life, and Milla Jovovich (although far more beautiful) plays her well. As the hypnosis sessions continue, steadily growing more and more bizarre, Abigail starts to believe that it is alien contact her patients are recalling. Her own ‘close encounter’ is then revealed when a tape-recorder captures an alien voice and her own frightening behaviour when she accidently falls asleep while dictating her therapy sessions. She starts to connect this alien encounter with her own husbands murder which happened a couple of years earlier. However, we later learn that her husbands murder is not all it seems. Over the course of the movie her world starts to fall apart and ends in a heart-breaking finale.

In reality the FBI put the Nome disappearances down to a combination of alcohol and frigid weather conditions. There have never been any indications that there was any alien involvement, though nine of the twenty bodies were never found.

The movie is scary and believable. It also left all of us talking about it long after it had finished which, for me, is always a good indicator that a movie was worth seeing.

Something Wicked 7.5/10