Pop Culture for Fun

  District 9 was a good movie. It was better than it had any right to be, considering first time director Neil Bloomkamp and would you know it, first time actor Sharlto Copley(and no I won’t count the short they did earlier in 2005 since it’s just the prologue for their recent cinematic venture). I only had one problem with the movie: was it action? was it satire? was it a mockumentary? a startling analysis of human nature? summer entertainment? If your answer is all of them, it’s partially right. There are movies that incorporate all of those and work, but this is not one of them.

  The movie is fun to watch, but at the same time frustrating. The action’s good, but that gets started rather late. The mockumentary bits work at one level, but become confusing as the action gets switched from news, documentary or security camera footage to scenes where there’s no such thing in sight. Ok, I can live with that, it’s used to emphasize some moments. Now comes the satire part, it throws in, not that subtly comparisons begging to be made to South Africa, refugees, riots, slums and large corporations. Trouble is, those are the side-dish, and sometimes feel like filling. And the analysis on human nature? Well we do discover (brilliant choice) that the main character is selfish and self-serving. But at the very end the movie cheats us of a true impact as far as social commentary goes, by making the character a hero, selfless as he seems to sacrifice himself for the good of others (guess what, that’s the same character who performed an abortion on an alien and joked about it just an hour ago).

  In the end, this is just what’s wrong with Sci-Fi today: they can’t seem to go for the complex (see Solaris for example, not the new one), without dumbing it down and that’s just because of the public’s (main public that is) expectations of a Science Fiction movie – SFX and action(and the Transformer franchise does not help at all).

Posted on September 11th, 2009 by MrWiseguy
Filed under: Movies