District 9 2009

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• “Is this Neill Blomkamp's best work?”

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Reviews

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• CinemaSerfon TMDB · Jun 20257/10

  The first twenty minutes or so of this is presented as if it were a documentary and with information whizzing about all over the place and tiny onscreen graphics attempting to set the scene, I found it really quite annoying. I was tempted to just give up, but gladly I didn’t because once it gets going it’s really quite good. Perhaps aliens have been watching the telly over the years so this time they have decided to skip the expected military welcome they’ve always received in the USA and gone to South Africa. Their mother ship parks itself above Johannesburg bearing a cargo of critters (they bear quite a resemblance to Arnie’s pals in “Predator”) who are looking for somewhere to live. The solution? Well that’s the favela-style shanty town called “District 9” where they are left in an almost feral squalor to fend for themselves. What proves to be of far more interest to humanity is their isomorphic weaponry, and when we discover a rather brutal way of getting round that security feature then things become even more perilous for the visitors. Determined to relocate the million-odd population, it falls to the nominally civilian process led by “Wikus” (Sharlto Copley) to organise thei

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• Filipe Manuel Netoon TMDB · Oct 20235/10

  **For a low-budget film, it's a good effort.** I'm not a big fan of films about aliens, so the film won't be my cup of tea at all. However, that didn't stop me from seeing it, and appreciating what's good about it. Without a colossal budget or a powerful studio, director Neill Blomkamp gives us an intelligent and technically impactful film. In fact, it is in the most technical details that I felt impressed by the film: we have extraordinary cinematography, with magnificent light and colors. The effects and CGI used are very good and prove that you don't need an endless bag of money to get a good result. The ship is strange enough and the aliens are credible enough, with a bizarre but elaborate and well-made appearance, and the way they speak is, at the same time, expressive and enigmatic. Much of the film was filmed in a real South African slum, and it is difficult to see that human beings are still living in such an environment. The director bet on little-known actors, and this gives some additional credibility to the list of characters that were created here. Sharlto Copley is perhaps the easiest to recognize, as he has worked on some of the most widely circulated productions. He

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• Kamuraion TMDB · Jul 20209/10

  Great watch, will watch again, and highly recommended. This has a wonderfully exciting premise: alien refugees on Terra, how Terrans react and how the aliens react. The premise, as delivered, has some odd holes in though: it's specified that all of the crew have died, mysteriously, and no one knows how to operate the ship, but it's been in the air for some time. The idea of gravity alone should have motivated Johannesburg to evacuate, but their government interaction seems decidedly weak. The advantage of setting the story in South Africa, for an American audience, is that it's a very capitalistic society where they speak chiefly English: it's very similar to being set in Mexico and using Mexican Cartels instead of Nigerian gangs. So if we accept that we haven't been able to extract an incident report, that we're not able to move the ship, and none of the xenos can move the ship, then the premise includes that one xenos knows what to do. One would think that he just talks to someone and he gets all his people off planet, but since he's smart enough to do what he's been doing for 20 years, then he knows not to trust anyone. But this self-serving principle is key to understanding cha

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