Wednesday, September 02, 2009

District 9 Movie: Brilliant!

I enjoy going to the movies as much as the next person, but unfortunately I must say that most of the time over the last few years I've been sorely disappointed with most of the new releases I've seen.

One of the worst movies I've ever seen was the recent release of 'GI Joe'. I could tolerate most of the stereotypical and poorly thought out plot, right up until the point where a piece of Antartica was blown up and then pieces of iceberg started sinking and piercing the stereotypical 'evil under water lair of the bad guys'. They probably spent about $2M on that CGI scene, and they couldn't think to get someone with a brain to work out that if a BIG piece of ice is floating above an underwater city, and you blow it up, the SMALL pieces aren't going to start sinking. Ice floats no matter what. Duh. Sooo painful.

So I was delighted and surprised when I went to see 'District 9' produced by NZ's own Peter Jackson (and directed by Neill Blomkamp). This was a movie where you could easily initially assume that the plot would fall into the same "I've seen this movie 100 times before" category, with aliens, bombs etc, but Peter did a MASTERFUL job of getting on board with a movie that ACTUALLY made you believe it could be real - Filmed in a kind of 'CNN documentary' fashion, I don't think I've ever seen another movie quite like it. And I actually enjoyed the movie significantly MORE because there was no big name actor like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise in the action scenes. Made it so much more believable. Peter must be starting to become very popular with film backers, because not only does he make great movies that I personally want to go and watch, but he must save at least $20M by not hiring big name actors. The small time lead actor in District 9 I think did JUST as good a job of acting the part as any 'big namer' I've seen recently.

I wonder if there is a bit of a sea change happening in the movie industry at the moment - all the pressures of Piracy, DVDs, Home Theatres and YouTube toward non-star based films must be having some effect. If more films like District 9 start being made, and less of the Hollywood junk films that look the same as 100 other films, and you can't remember which film is which, because they all start the same people, then it's got to be a good thing...