I want to preface this week's post by saying that I generally hate action movies. They overdo the action, create unrealistic stories, and almost never are able to fully flesh out the plots they're given. Unfortunately, District 9 falls into that "never" category for me. District 9 was an interesting movie, and I don't mean interesting in a great way. I've got a friend that always spoke really highly of this movie, and since we're doing a 200 Days 200 Movies thing, I decided to give it a try. Well, not really "decided", because we all take turns picking movies and this was the one he chose. But I still chose to watch it to honor the rules. So going into this, you can imagine I had pretty high expectations for this movie. And on that note, let's talk about what I liked about the movie. For one, it's a pretty unique and interesting concept. Aliens come to Earth not out of hostility, but out of desperation. When the humans did attempt making contact with the aliens, they seemed deprived of nutrition and desperate for escape from the ship that seemed to have trapped them there. Upon releasing them, the citizens of Johannesburg immediately turn to violence against the "prawns," and a militarized zone is dedicated to the "safety" and study of them. Shocking. Something else of note, that they even brought up in the opening of the movie, is the fact that rather than parking over some major city in the US like New York or Los Angeles, the ship parked over Johanessburg, South Africa. The conflict was also pretty interesting. Wikus, the protagonist, is not only fighting to save himself, but rather save himself from a virus that slowly ended up turning him into one of the prawns. Throughout the movie, he's constantly attempting to get Christopher, a prawn he befriended, back onto the mothership so he can save his own people and get the cure for the virus that Wikus took on. And now, time for something completely different: what I didn't like about District 9. I mentioned this in my review of Gravity last week, and that's that I simply don't care about the characters. The movie's documentary-style of filming made it pretty weird to follow, especially at the beginning. The sheer number of people that the movie opens with talking to the camera for the in-world documentary leaves for a pretty confusing first 20 minutes, where it's hard to figure out who the main character is. This confusing 20 minutes doesn't sound like much, but when most of the rest of the movie is following the same one guy and not much else, it's not exactly an ideal way to watch a movie. Forgetting the first 20 minutes, I kind of liked the first half of the movie. It sets off with a pretty interesting conflict, about a guy fighting a virus, the military, and aliens at the same time. But then it devolves into a generic, guns-blazing, explosive action movie. Like I said at the start, I hate action movies for not being able to flesh out the stories they have. District 9 absolutely could have had the chance to do so, but since the sequel for it got cancelled, it leaves a lot of loose ends by the end. If this movie had gotten a sequel, I genuinely think it could have been a lot better than it turned out to be. But honestly, it isn't. 6/10
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