by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright August 2009
Two movies, and I saw them as different as night and day on the moon. Moon was wonderful as a science fiction mystery that told a new story with a new style and pacing. District 9, on the other hand, has me seriously wondering about orbital mind control lasers--it's the first explanation that came to mind to explain all the positive buzz this movie has been getting, because it doesn't deserve any. My rating of it: The biggest disappointment of the 2009 movie season.
Moon is a mystery, and a pretty good one, so I'll try not to reveal too much of the ending.
The start of Moon was unsettling. We have a single man, living on a mining base on the far side of the moon, staying there for three years, and his communication link is broken, so he is not in direct contact with Earth. This is unsettling for many reasons: The chief one being, for safety sake, why is he alone? Why is he cut off? Why aren't there other mining bases nearby that he can talk to or turn to for aid?
This sounds totally crazy, and it bugged me for most of the movie. It turns out, there's a neat answer to this, and it's part of the mystery story so I won't say more.
The really neat parts of the movie were:
o The pacing of the movie was nice. It was slow and thoughtful, which resonated well with the mystery.
o The man's robot helper remains a consistently good robot helper throughout the movie. It doesn't cleche into something psycho or babble on wondering about its humanity.
o The setwork was good. It felt like a moon base.
o The solo living lifestyle is well depicted.
o The story is nicely original, and I applaud it's technofiction feeling.
All-in-all, I heartily recommend it. It could be the technofiction movie of the year.
Here are some weaknesses I noted:
o This base has been going for three years, but the outdoor scenes show the moon rover always wandering over pristine landscape where it's leaving the first tire tracks. There should have been a lot of scenes with it driving places with lots of tire tracks already.
o As mentioned earlier, the base's communication is cut off. The ultimate reason for this is good, but until you get to that ultimate reason, the interim explanations are seriously flimsy.
o It's not clear what this man is doing on the base that robots couldn't be handlling. Even by the end, this is still true.
But, these are small points. Overall, it's worthy of watching.
Now we come to the dark side.
The first peculiarity I noticed about District 9 was that not a single review mentioned Alienation, its 1988 predecessor with the same racist discrimination theme. The reviewers were uniformly enthusiastic about how the movie was breaking new ground in science fiction, and enthusiastic about the movie in general, but no mention of Alienation. ... Hmmm.
Having now seen the movie, I'm convinced this is because all the early reviewers were being controlled by the Distict 9 orbital mind control lasers.
I say this because the movie is terrible, agonizingly terrible.
The first half is done in that up-and-coming pseudo-documentary style that uses shaky camera work, fast music video-style edits, and inane talking heads to set up the story. It's a style that is very hard for this old fogey to watch--my visual processing systems can't keep up. And, I don't watch TV news or cable documentaries because they are such badly biased sources of information, so this format adds no credibility for me.
The other problem with pseudo-documentary style is that it's a cover up for a bad story, and District 9 is a prime example of that.
Here are some problems I noted:
o No good explanation for why a space ship parks in mid-air. Part of the problem with this is, if the aliens have good enough technology to levitate a ship for twenty years, how come they don't have good enough technology to buy their way out of the slum?
o No good explanation for why the inhabitants can't fend for themselves. Especially since they have brought to Earth tons and tons of weaponry that the staple SF bad guy--evil earth corporations--are lusting for. Even odder, it was earth helicopters that were doing the transporting of aliens to earth, and the earth people didn't notice these weapons being moved?
o No good explanation of why there isn't some leader-to-leader talking before the evictions start. The lame explanation is that the aliens don't seem to have leaders.
o The eviction process is good make-fun-of-bureaucracy comedy, but way, way too chaotic. The scale of what is happening is uncomfortable. Also the scale of what is happening when the gun-play starts is inconsistent. In the first half of the movie, there's tons of human firepower around. When the shooting actually starts, we are down to a dozen shooters with only small arms.
o The groundbreaking stuff in this movie seems to be how much indignity the aliens suffer in front of the camera. For me, that's uncomfortable, not exciting, or moving.
o The role of the Nigerian gangsters doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because alien-human commerce is never defined. Do the aliens work outside District 9? If they don't, what payment are the gangsters getting for what they bring in? And, how do the gangsters get stuff in to sell?
o In the beginning of the big shootout, the chief alien is shocked, SHOCKED, to discover humans have been dissecting his kind. Given that Nigerian gangsters in District 9 have been eating the aliens for years in hopes of gaining the power to work their weapons, this seems incongruous.
In sum: It ... was ... AGONY!
Which brings us back to the biggest mystery of the movie: The first one: How did it get such favorable early reviews?
I don't know, but I'm sure that once the reviewers get their tin-foil hats on again, the world will be safe from hearing such insanity for the sequel.
I'm sure. <Brrrrit> ... I'm sure. <Brrrrit> ... I'm sure. ...
-- The End --