Reviews

There is a positive educational aspect to this movie. Kids - don't do drugs, don't drink excess alcohol and generally avoid any hallucinogens. They are bad, very bad for you. Just to think, that hundreds of people - actors, technicians, cinematographers, costume designers, set designers came together to make this.....

Among all the Terminators, this one is a pure junk, on any level. Be it originality, script, acting, effects and CGI, action and etc. Some people say, the movie is bad because it doesn't follow the rest of the series or doesn't fit after T2.

But the reality is the film is just bad on its own. There is no there, there. It's boring, mediocre and stupid.

Yet another dull product out of Disney factory. The problem is that you cannot manufacture scripts and music - you need an actual talent and the soul for that. So while the technical aspects of the movie are undisputed, along with well choreographed dancing numbers, the script is mediocre and the acting is uneven.

Overall, the movie projects a feeling of attending a circus performance - a hodge-podge of disjointed animation and dance sequences barely glued together to make a coherent story.

I'm usually not the person who enjoys these kind of movies, but this in particular I found to be very enjoyable. Yes the mistaken identity plot of the story is not new, however what matters is how it was approached.

Shot beautifully on location it feels the atmosphere with European essence. There are no continuous crude and in-your face gags (which is the primary reason I guess many disliked the movie), no trite situations offensive to your intelligence.

The movie does not have a frantic pace instead offering a hopelessly romantic and delectable experience with high level acting of all main three heroines and the side characters. Being a "teen oriented" comedy there were some situations that were a bit overly sugar-coated but even then you won't get diabetes from it.

In fact I would say this movie is everything that Midnight Paris or To Rome with Love were not.

I won't comment on the merits of the plot and script of this movie, because those parts were completely "expendable".

Rather, I would to highlight the incredible and astounding amount of violence depicted on the screen. But, what was more astounding was the reaction from the audience to people limbs broken, people slashed, mutilated, decapitated and etc.

The audience laughed, giggled and generally had good time. American society is very sick and Hollywood continues on its merry way of sanitizing the last remaining aspects of humanity, morals and intelligence from people's brains.

Crass, stupid, low grade, primitive, idiotic, filled with toilet humor, degenerate and outlandish - these are all fine qualities of the movie and its viewers love it for that. That tells you the cultural lows of the society that adores it.

The pseudo-intellectual non-sense about the movie exposing American intolerance - just further showcases the ignorance of its audience.

Intolerance and insensitivity are one of the main human traits and can be found across all continents, races and nations. That's why we had a Holocaust but also the Rwanda massacre.

This primitive farce does nothing to enhance neither intelligence of it's audience nor promote a more favorable view of Hollywood overseas. It completely reasserts all the stereotypes, and rightly so, of the kind of entertainment that abundance, high-quality of life and having no grounding in any kind of human tragedy (like WWII was for Europeans) cause people to enjoy.

Whether intentionally or by accident the creators of this movie concocted one of the most original and unorthodox sci-fi movies in the recent history. It is not perfect but it is certainly not conventional in typical Hollywood sense.

This is the movie where I think you can find a lot of things to think about, besides the wrapper of explosions, gore, aliens and space ships.

But let's first dispense with the superficial. The special effects in this movie are astounding in their realism and relevance. The movie doesn't feel overburdened with them nor do they take the priority over the plot of the movie. Unlike in many modern movies, the special effects here seem to be transparently woven with the rest of the movie and help deliver its punch ever more successfully (Avatar comes to the mind where CGI is just a brainless assemblage of of candy tacked on with no real purpose)

Here are some of the things and ideas that I think District 9 leaves the viewer to think about:

1) We as humans anywhere on this planet are inherently racist and suspicious of anybody acting or looking differently than we are no matter what our race is or nationality. This quality is perhaps a part of our animal nature and transcends our race origins. There is a large history of white colonialism and apartheid, however it is a mistake not to see that any groups of people in power, majority or any significant numbers have inherent prejudices toward other groups that are somehow different from them. We don't have to go very far in history or geography for an example: the Rwanda genocide.

2) Why aliens became a subjugated formless mass or what separates the civilized advanced society from the mass of people simply fulfilling their base desires? We live in an advanced society filled with computers, advanced metallurgy, advanced chemical processing, space shuttles and particle colliders. But take a hundred individuals off the street and how many know how to and where to find, mine and process ore, how to synthesize various chemical compounds, how to create semiconductors, perform integration or differentiation or recite a table of chemical elements. The fact is it took a humongous amount of time of trial and error and a few geniuses to propel our understanding of the world. Where would we be without Newton, Gauss, Copernicus, Archimedes, Einstein, Darwin, Tesla and etc.

3) Why sometimes a superior mass of people cannot/doesn't rebel against its oppressors? Well we don't have to travel very far in history to see such examples: Holocaust, various terrorist hostage situations where a handful of terrorists can command a huge number of people.

But the movie is not just the ideas, it is also filled with truthfully delivered drama of the main hero struggle to first fall in-line and do his job, then with his egotistic desire to save himself and any cost and finally liberating himself for own sacrifice to help the suffering creatures.

First of: I saw this movie in Imax but not in 3D.

If you are interested in understanding how Hubble operates, its engineering, day-to-day duties of the astronauts or any kind of coherent study of how stars are born and die then this movie will disappoint you.

The movie constantly errs on more emotional side, especially in presenting the astronauts. Some of the narration is also a bit too disingenuous - the crews going up the orbit are presented as some sort of breakthrough heroes doing something that had never been done before them - going into space.

What the movie does offer is spectacular imagery of shuttle launches, Hubble itself, and its "repair" and some light perusal into the astronaut's lives in the orbit. You will also see some spectacular imagery Hubble was able to capture and some explanation of it.

In the words of one of the main characters, just sit back and "let your mind go blank". I think this phrase perfectly sums up this movie - the chewy bubble gum, the pretty wrapper on some very cheap and sugary candy, the triumph of superficiality over substance.

I would genuinely like to salute all the technologists, programmers, engineers, and the artists that made this movie possible. But beyond the spectacle of all the special effects and 3D graphics, for the sake of effects, there is not much to see here.

I remember in the first "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe", you were truly awed by the spectacle of the grandiose battle. In the "District 9" you were grappled by the original story, unusual plot twists, interesting dialogues, and unusual ending. The special effects in the "District 9" were so amazing and so organically woven into the fabric of the movie (although the movie itself was a bit too much graphic), that they transcended the usual "special effects" experience, and became just a natural part of the story.

Nothing of that sort was experienced by me while watching this latest Hollywood creation. The story is recycled, re-recycled, the music is typically generic (probably the same composer writes music for all these blockbusters), coherent dialogues are pretty much non-existent (they might have as well made it into a silent movie). The plot, the characters, the twists, the ending are so trite and ridiculous that it is just an insult to watch it for any thinking person.

The only redeeming factor was the planet's atmosphere, but after first 30 minutes or so of watching dressed-up earth and its creatures (horses, rhinos, wolves, and etc), an incredible feeling of boredom overtook me and I really could care less for who was killed at the end.

What kind of movie do you get from a prominent movie director, who emigrated from USSR to find the political and economical freedom, and who finds that Hollywood is not really interested in producing anything remotely connected with intelligence? Well, what you get is some form of conglomerate-typical action plot nonsense, but elevated to a higher form of realism through the magnificent cinematography, actors that are now actually forced to act(probably a rare occurrence in their careers) and the ending endowed with the magnificent music.

Despite the superficial banality of the subject, Konchalovsky has been allowed to take movie into rather more pessimistic direction with good amount of philosophical underpinnings.