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Anyone else get a chance to see this yet? Saw it last night. Amazing visuals, great performances, good story. I wound up really enjoying it. Certainly raises the bar for compositing and match-move.
For those unaware of the story surrounding the production, this is the Director Peter Jackson had picked to direct the live-action Halo feature. That production wound up imploding, and while I remain hopeful that there will be a Halo film at some point, there's nothing solid in the pipeline. I was excited to see that Jackson and Blomkamp were still eager enough to work together to make District 9. Sort of hints at what the Halo movie might have been. I.E. great.
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I thought it was fairly good as well, although some parts of it made me a bit queasy. Just discovered the viral part of the movie, pretty interesting.
-------------------- "Its coming on. I just saw the wall move..."
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Yeah, that one alien sometimes showed more emotion than the main character. It was an excellent film and I hope they do a sequel.
Registered: Feb 2005
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Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
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I read the write up in Wiki. It is even comparable to Alien Nation?
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Yeah, I liked it better than Alien Nation. Kind of rough though. Saw it again last night, (this time with a lady! Her presence made me realize, that, yeah:) There's some pretty brutal violence and more than a few gross-out sequences in there. If that sort of stuff makes you squeamish, be forewarned.
And manoman is that ever some superlative compositing!
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Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
posted
quote:Originally posted by bX: Yeah, I liked it better than Alien Nation. Kind of rough though. Saw it again last night, (this time with a lady! Her presence made me realize, that, yeah:) There's some pretty brutal violence and more than a few gross-out sequences in there. If that sort of stuff makes you squeamish, be forewarned.
And manoman is that ever some superlative compositing!
Yeah i was doing the 'Look/Don't look' shit with my dad when i saw it Saturday. Still good. Had that documentary thing going for it and of course, they channeled Battletech, Mobile Suit Gundam: 8thMST as well as pretty Destroid (macross, you twits) action in teh Prawn Power Armor final fight.
plus the end is .... well, like all the peps in the end, nobody knows (if) they return, will the prawn bring their... ill getback to this...
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The power armor was the shit.
Registered: Feb 2005
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Da_bang80
A few sectors short of an Empire
Member # 528
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I wish I had the time and/or money to go see this movie. I don't have time because I'm taking a college course and I don't have the money because I don't have a job.
Oh well I got to go out and play with chainsaws yesterday, someone should have told me that cutting trees down was so much fun.
-------------------- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I cannot accept. And the wisdom to hide the bodies of all the people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.
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Saw it last night. GREAT movie! Got in a bit late at about the point where Vickus was being promoted maybe a little before that. Did they get into how the aliens first arrived and what they are doing there?
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
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Well from what I recall the mothership just appeared over the city one day. Some soldiers cut an entryway into the hull, where they found the aliens emaciated and dying. Exactly how they ended up on Earth and what they were doing beforehand was not explained. Once the command module (the smaller ship) fell off and got lost in the ground below, the aliens were effectively stranded.
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Humans did get on board the ship? And they transported the aliens to the surface? I think I might have walked in when I saw something drop from the mothership - so the little ship that the Alien guy with the redshirt on had below his shack was the command ship that ran the entire mothership?
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
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Yep it was the command ship. And the humans did cut a hole into the side of the ship and got onboard, but how they transported the aliens to the surface is not explained. Presumably they were transported by helicopters.
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Saw it last night, it seemed like they left out some exposition, maybe they left it for the eventual sequel. It seemed Christopher and the other alien with the brightly-colored vest were like Science caste, while the majority of the District 9 aliens were Workers and Grunts, low on intelligence and initiative. I wish Christopher had mentioned what the aliens called themselves, it's sad having to use the racist "Prawn" but there's nothing else to go by. Also, it feels silly to say "Prawn battlesuit", sounds like something seafood uses to fight back against the Swedish chef.
At first, me and my brother agreed that main character Wikus Van Der Merve was a perfect cross between this guy and this guy. Mistakenly spraying your face with a toxic chemical, assuring everyone that all is under control, then barfing over your own birthday cake and tripping into it while trying to wipe it off, it's more Monty-like than Monty. I liked his style, though, kind of a cross between Nicholas Cage and Christian Bale, with neither the schizoidness of the former nor the narcissism of the latter.
I loved the design of the alien tech. The mothership was as adequately dull and functional as NASA aesthetics, no dazzling lights and funky shapes, just sturdy and utilistic. The little command ship was beautiful and eerie, you couldn't quite figure out what it looked like from watching only one angle. It had sharp corners and edges very much like the design theme of the "Combine" technology in "Half-Life 2".
In fact, District 9 and Half-Life 2 intersect in many neat ways:
- the weapons: you have the electrostatic gun that instazaps people to mush; the singularity-grenade launcher which fires an energy ball that vaporizes the strike area on contact and lets off a cloud of static; the high-RPM autorifle (also similar to the "needler", an alien gun in HALO, whose movie was put on hold to make this one) and last but not least, the gravity gun, which grabs debris in mid-air and throws it where aimed. They couldn't have picked better inspiration. - Prawn Battlesuit vs Combine Strider - the "Combine" uses human shock-troops augmented with alien DNA, in a controlled hybrid-state. - in the Half-Life 2 universe you eventually get the help of benign members of the insectoid Vortigaunt species, who are great with technology and are divided into enslaved and freethinking individuals (not by choice though). - The vortigaunt Uriah and Prawn Christopher.
This movie had some of the most realistic CGI I've seen in recent years, the indoor alien scenes were very believable, and the battlesuit had great inertia and weight, on top of looking stunning.
The design of the alien weaponry was nice, very clunky and angular like the alien rifles of HL2, but despite the sweet "William Gibson"-ish paintjobs they were all about function, not gaudiness like in MiB.
Christopher's naïve yet wise hatchling son (I refer to him as "Butters") could've come straight from a role in Wall-E, here's hoping he gets a spinoff. :.)
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