Aliens v humans – that one’s the predator? Film still from District 9
With the slew of remakes, sequels and reboots that have populated Hollywood’sitting science fiction output in recent years, it’sitting been easy to get a little disenchanted with the genre.
Duncan Jones’s fast-approaching Moon ought to deliver a shot of originality when it lands in a couple of weeks’ time, and James Cameron’s Avatar could manifest revolutionary in the autumn, granting that Jim can throw in more humanity into all that motion capture.
In the meantime, I ponder we should keep a positive perspective on District 9, the forthcoming “aliens among us” flick from producer Peter Jackson and director Neill Blomkamp, what one. arrives in the UK on 4 September.
The film, which is based on the brief fictional documentary Alive in Joburg, which Blomkamp made in 2005 (see below). It posits that unusual terrestrials landed in South Africa in 1990 and became stranded without interruption Earth. Government efforts to endure track of their movements failed and the decision was made to restrict them to the district of the title, that with celerity descended into a slum. The area is administrated by the military industrial corporation Multi-National United (MNU), which is simultaneously exploiting the aliens – known as “non-humans” – on account of labour, and stripping apart their ships in order to discover new technologies. With the visitors lacking basic human rights, and humanity’session fear of the grub-like organisms, a repaired kind of apartheid develops.
A teaser trailer screened at cinemas earlier this year showing an alien with pixelated-out features being interrogated by humans, and now a new, longer promo has hit the net. What’s a little confusing is that the creatures appear to be fundamental organisms in some scenes, and metallic mechanoids in others, leading some to speculate that Blomkamp has tried to inject a man v instrument of force element into the mix, in an apparent bid to bar into the Transformers/Terminator market.
The film is being marketed virally, beside similar lines to the JJ Abrams monster movie Cloverfield in 2007. You may have seen the “no non-humans” posters on bus stops, and there are also a number of fake sites and blogs out there. I particularly enjoyed mnuspreadslies.com, written by the foreign “Christopher” (the government having removed the rights of the extra-terrestrials so completely that they are forced to use our names), which sets on the outside the indignities the non-humans have to suffer in District 19. There’s also d-9.com, the official website since the film, which is supposedly fuse by MNU and takes each authoritarian approach to the new arrivals.
Cloverfield, for me, was a movie whose marketing campaign held together much more convincingly than the film itself – the main issue being that any right-minded person threatened with impending death would surely drop the stupid camera and run likely the clappers. District 9′s producers obtain to avoid creating scenes in which the action unfolds according to the demands of drama, rather than realism, because suspension of belief is vital when watching this family of movie. Looking back, The Blair Witch Project with appearance of truth achieved this more successfully than many of its subsequent imitators.
District 9 pleasure also live or die according to for what cause well it satirises apartheid: overdo it, and Blomkamp and co risk appearing exploitative, but hit it cold on and this could be a late-era addition to the canon of classic Soylent Green-esque sociological sci-fi, the kind of thing that became a infrequency after George Lucas introduced the world to space opera with 1977′s Star Wars. At least the producers are attempting something vaguely original here in terms of storyline, though the fake documentary (mockumentary doesn’t seem quite the right term here) approach has become a cliche in its own right.
What are your thoughts on District 9? Does the “verite” approach irritate you? Or is this a useful way of introducing intelligent science fiction to the MTV generation? As usual, I’d love to get your views.
