Also you mention the supposedly diverse South Africa as if you are unaware of the fact its a rather corrupt shell of the old Mandela idealism.

And who is to say the Alien father is not also a type of female, in fact the aliens seem to be utterly sexless considering you never see them engage in any type of sexual act (bar the photoshop picture where they are receiving rather then giving so to speak) and their appears to be a lack of identifiable genitalia. Dare I say it is Alien racism on display Boxy!

I never found the violence numbing at any point either simply because of the utterly destructive nature of it tends to overload the human brains ability to compartmentalise. Movies have to a certain degree trivialised "mundane" death like shotgun but when I see somebody or some alien on screen literally explode like a firecracker the massive punch of it is just impossible to ignore.

I'm afraid I consider that criticism to be abit of a cop out. You are using vague terms in an attempt to make the statement correct by proxy. I mean if I wanted I could take this statement and say The Shawshank Redemption re-affirms that all black men are dangerous criminals since Red spent 40 years inside. Or that Die Hard showed Americans can never trust evil Europeans...................ok I'm taking the piss with that one abit but still!

I have several reservations about it, some of which are fundamentally unfair if taken as judgment values against the film (they are not).

If you pushed me for criticism's I found the entire Nigerian voodoo black magic angle to be rather silly. Plus the main player says fookin hell way to much!

Let's recap:

All financially viable films are hypocritical examples of corporate greed regardless of their message.

Absolutely, because the genius of capitalism is that it can support criticism of itself within its bounds very comfortably, and churn it out for profit. That's why Marxist scholars at colleges and elsewhere can go on criticizing capitalism while having, for the most part, cushioned teaching jobs and healthy income from book sales, lectures, and whatever else.

its a sad fact the majority of the criminal element in African communities in Europe are of Nigerian descent.

I imagine that filmmakers in the world in which the film is set would have made lots and lots of films about the aliens over the course of the 20 years. If the filmmakers had shown people in the film going to a film about the aliens, that would have been a neat moment of self-awareness, especially if the films were made by MNU.

I drove through several West African countries 7 months ago and those warlords in D9 looked very familiar to me. It's easy to quote text but when you're in the thick of shit, it's a different story. In that regard, I thought D9 was fairly realistic.

Man, when did this thread become Dark Knight vs. Box 2.0?

The Briss has returned!!! The first issue of the Nevada Sagebrush was published today which contains my first full review since Wolverine. This year I am going to really push to get on rotten tomatoes. I'm sure many of you will find that downright wrong, but I meet all the qualifications and am only improving on my writing skills even if I have a very different view on movies. So give it to me straight guys like you always do!

http://nevadasagebrush.com/blog/2009/08 ... ar-sci-fi/

your reviews, while sometimes very misguided, imo, are a pleasure to read and you belong on RT far more than people like armond white and Stephanie whatsername, do. It would be cool if they put you on.
don't have time at the moment to read that whole review but I will and get back to you. Glad you liked this film.

There's a lot more to District 9 than just exploding Tesla guns. Did you know one actor played all the aliens, plus some major scenes were improvised? We list the top things you should know about the new alien epic.

After the District 9 roundtable and a one-on-one with director Neill Blomkamp, we found out a lot about what went on behind the scenes while making the alien feature. And some of the District 9 fact we uncovered may shock you, all quotes are from Blomkamp:

One actor plays all of the talking aliens.

It's only one actor who plays every alien, it's Jason Cope. He plays every single alien.

Most, if not all, of the alien interaction and dialogue with Wikus during the eviction scene was improvised by Jason Cope or the actor Sharlto Copely (Wikus).

So we would film the two of them and then we would go to a different shack. And he'd pretend to evict a new alien. Then we'd go somewhere else and somewhere else. So it was just the two of them. It's the conversations between those two, the actual dialogue and what actually came out of them was totally improved. Any details in words and the language between the two happened right there on the day of shooting. That what makes it feel like they are really communicating...

But stuff like when he walks up in to the shack and says, "this is a gang sign, we're in a gang area right here," we would draw the sign on the wall and he would randomly say it's a gang area. And that meant because he's walking up to a shack that has an alien in it with a whole story that we've written with those guys distilling their fluid and I'm like, "that's interesting you just said that the supporting alien character is a gangster." But if it works, we keep going.


The District 9 alien homes were actually shot in a recently evacuated area of impoverished housing. The homes you see the aliens getting evicted from were homes that humans had recently been kicked out of, for real.

There was a very weird cross over between the film and the reality of filming. We filmed in an area called Chiawelo, which is a suburb of Soweto, which is sort of a suburb of Johannesburg. And there is this thing in Africa called RDP housing, which are government-subsidised housing. Where they will build you a brick house in a different area of the city. And you get put put on a waiting list if you're a South African impoverished resident, until you are able to get one of these houses. So the area we filmed the movie in, what plays as District 9, every single resident in that area was being removed to be put into RDP housing. Although not all of them had been given the green light on the RDP housing, most of them had, but all of them were going to be moved, whether they liked it or not. So we ended up with this open piece of land with all these shacks on it...each day we came to set, there were fewer and fewer people.

As you may know, District 9 was inspired by Neill Blomkamp's short film Alive In Joburg. But what many people don't realize is that he created Alive In Joburg's footage of people being interviewed about aliens, by using real interviews.

I was asking black South Africans about black Nigerians and Zimbabweans. That's actually where the idea came from was there are aliens living in South Africa, I asked "What do you feel about Zimbabwean Africans living here?" And those answers — they weren't actors, those are real answers...


The "Prawn" are from the Andromeda Galaxy.

I think that they [the Prawn] do have a home planet, it's pretty far away probably in the Andromeda Galaxy, but what I like is that they'll live on the ship for thousands of years. Obviously, there's much more of a population on the main planet, but the ships will go out and get the minerals and the ore and whatever resources they need and then bring them all back home.