I seened a movie. ‘Twasn’t the movie we really wanted to see but a big FAIL! on my part in reading cinema times meant we arrived at about the only time in the day when (500) Day Of Summer wasn’t about to start. So the choice was District 9 or Dorian Grey. Despite my unadulterated love for all things Wildean, the trailers are not doing it for me. I get the feeling that it’s not a cinema film, it’s a £3-DVD-out-of-the-bargain-bin-to-sit-next-to-Queen-Of-The-Damned-on-the-shelf-film.
The eponymous District 9 is a ghetto in Johannesburg where a race of stranded aliens [derogatorily referred to as prawns] have been living for the past twenty years. However, recently the good people of Jo’burg have been getting a bit fed up with the aliens being around and decide they want to ship them off to the arse-end of nowhere so they don’t have to look at them anymore. Of course, the aliens don’t particularly want to be evicted from their slums into an even worse area so they’re going to put of a little bit of resistance.
The problem with District 9 is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, it’s shot like a documentary, it starts off down the path of social commentary, but it doesn’t really stick to the path for that long – after all you can’t really have lots of fugitive-style-running-about with a straight up social commentary. Then, for a moment or so, it looks like we’re going down the buddy film route, complete with a cute little kiddie, but no, again that was nothing but another ploy to keep us viewers on our toes. All it really wants to be, after all the flipping and flopping, is a shooty, bang!, bang!, guns’n'trucks’n'blood’n'gore alien-fest. There are some pretty heavy-handed indicators early on as to what is going to happen, and yes, what you think is going to happen is what is going to happen.
In short, if you happen to show up too early for (500) Days Of Summer then you might want to hang out for a while playing with the swinging grabby cuddly toy machine or eating ice cream or any of the other things you can do in the cinema foyer.
