Sunday, August 16, 2009

Review: District-9

My standard rule after seeing a movie for the first time is to wait until the next day to pass judgement on it. But lately I've been making more and more exceptions to this.

I say lately, but as I sat in the theater today (technically yesterday...) I realized that I hadn't been to a movie theater since Christmas! So I suppose my exceptions aren't too infrequent:

District 9
By: Who cares who else was involved, it was by Peter Jackson.

The Short:
Sci-fi flick about aliens that end up as refugees on earth. Surprise surprise, we don't treat them that well.

Add a whole lot of action, interesting raids on the alien slums, a boat load of gore, and more f-bombs than you could possibly count (although if someone counts them I'll be impressed) and you get a great movie that could be excellent were it not for the excessive language and unnecessary gore.

The Long:
That last bit there is the kicker - why couldn't this movie have been PG-13? Not much of the gore was actually necessary - heads blowing up, arms being ripped from bodies and consumed, etc etc.

The movie could have had just as many wicked cool guns and just as many deaths without blood constantly being splattered all over the universe.

And then there's the f-bombs, holy cow! You really can't believe how many times they drop the freak fest. Now, I'll give you that a lot of the time the favorite f-word was spoken in a British accent, so was really quite funny! But why so much?! It really was overboard there Jackson - way overboard.

The premise of the story is incredible - simply stupendous. It'll have me thinking for days. Even better, there's going to be a sequel to tie everything up and hopefully see the aliens get some sweet revenge.

Conclusion:
If you want to see a movie with an engaging story-line, interesting parallels to racism, and possibly the most thought-provoking opening premise of any recent movie, I recommend District 9. Of course, this comes with the HUGE caveat that you have to endure endless f-bombs and blood constantly splattering all over the place. Very silly sacrifice if you ask me...

1 comment:

Sean Weatherby said...

D-9 definitely has a lot going for it -- character development, great acting a at least a few people, awesome alien weapons; it felt a bit preachy at times at different times though