District 9 - At last a monster movie with a story!

District 9 - absolutely amazing! Such a fresh way to tell the story, even if it nods to Alien Nation (and even a bit of Starship Troopers), and the parallels between real world aparteid and refugee treatment made me very uncomfortable. I can only imagine that A LOT of this really happens, except to people in refugee camps worldwide...

And the mayhem is superb and completely over the top, yet believable because they are alien weapons, so you almost expect them to do horrible things...

But mainly, it was a great script/story. This drove the film and tension, not the carnage, like T4 and Transformers, and made the whole thing more enjoyable and 'meaningful'. For me, the mindless mayhem movies utterly bore me now, yes, the effects are great, but they are empty, pointless, in the big blockbusters. In District 9, the effects were used to fill in the blanks (or create blank space, like where a soldier used to be). Maybe a bit more character stuff with the aliens would have been good, like even finding out what they call themselves, but no doubt the sequel will answer a few of these queries.

On the character building note, the characters were utterly engaging, and I felt genuine sympathy for the aliens, they grew to be personalities as the film progressed, were far deeper than we were being led by the 'narrators' in this documentary. So we have the alien and his son escaping to go get help, our hero is turning into a 'prawn'. During the whole story we never find out what they are actually called. So what happens now? Who do we cheer for? If it was a human and child escaping to go get help, we would be cheering them on. And we cheer the aliens. In the sequel the aliens shall return to rescue their own, and then what happens? Do they lay waste to humanity for being so terrible to their people? This will really test sympathies and I have high expectations that they will pull off a remarkable conclusion. Or is this jaded soul going to be utterly disappointed by a lazy second movie...well, with Peter Jackson running the show, I imagine he simply will not allow this.

Now I worry about the sequel. What style is it done in? Is it another documentary, examination in retrospect, or is it run like Cloverfield, a running live style film capture...the charm of this movie lies in the documentary style... this is key! A regular simple linear story will lose all the ground this one covered so well...

As you can tell I like a decent movie, but I want monsters too! Why do directors automatically get lazy when it comes to making a great monster movie?