District 9

Ty gives **1/2 stars

Title: District 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Starring
Nobody I know
Release date August 14th 2009

I just have to say this is another film produced by a famous director opposed to being directed by said famous director himself. (Review previous blog entry.) Peter Jackson (Director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy) to be exact. So this film is about Aliens, but not the kind of aliens in films like Independence Day, Men in black or well... Alien. Though these aliens look scary, they are not. A friend of mine who was watching the movie with me said they were pacifists. I say they were just lazy. Aliens who don't fight back to me doesn't make sense. Even humans fight back.
So lets talk about the plot. The aliens come to earth. The aliens ship stops for some unknown reason and floats in mid-air. We, the humans go up to the ship and find literally over a million sick aliens. We bring them down to Earth and nurse them back to health and then we keep them in an area that resembles the slums called District 9 and don't let them leave. We take away their weapons, we take away their rights, and we let gangsters come in and take advantage of them for twenty years so they can adapt and become just as horrible as most human beings on the planet. Also, there's this plot about people not liking the aliens and people who think the aliens should be moved. People who love the aliens and people who hate them. So lets move them to a concentration camp away from everybody in the middle of Africa. Great.
This film is supposed to be about racism towards not another human being, but a new intelligent species. To be honest, I don't care. When it comes to my thoughts on racism, this is it so listen up. Don't treat people like they're special. Don't treat people any better or worse than you would treat anybody. If you could imagine wanting help in a situation and you come across someone where somebody might need your help, then by all means help them. But people shouldn't be obliged or feel obligated to go out of there way to help someone, just because they think that they should. If they had kept this philosophy in this movie, this is what would happen. Find aliens. Feed and water aliens. Release aliens back into space. The end.
So was the movie well made? How were the special effects? Well this movie was made to resemble a documentary. Think Cloverfield, except less shaky on the camera work and less exciting. The special effects were pretty dog gone cool. The weapons were out of this world. No pun intended. Some people loved this movie. Awesome. Some people saw great depth and insight into this movie. Okay. Whatever speaks to you. Should you pay whole price to see it? It depends on why you're seeing it. If you're looking for the baddest, biggest, action movie of the summer, this is not it. If you want to see something different that might provoke you to think, you could give this movie a try. If you really don't care about aliens who landed here on accident and weren't allowed to leave, then you're in the same boat as me.
But here is my question. What's the point? What is Neill Blomkamp trying to say? That humans are more interested in helping an alien race than human beings or that as humans we treat whoever we think is beneath us like cockroaches but pretend we care about them as long as we don't have to look or think about them? Is he trying to show us that this is wrong? Guess what? It is wrong. We knew that from the beginning. We don't need a film about cruelty to show us how bad the world is, and throwing in a plot twist about walking in another mans or aliens shoes isn't going to provoke the world to be a stronger, better, race of people. Next time you try directing a film, try teaching us something we don't know. Fail.