#27 District 9 - We are SO in trouble if this ever happens!

2009. dir. Neil Blonkamp, starring Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood, David James, Jason Cope.

Seen it before? No.

Shockingly enough I did like this movie. I liked the science fiction of how the alien weaponry could only be operated by the aliens due to their genetic make-up. Those were some BAD ASS weapons they had! Blew people up into little bits in no time flat!

I was angry at the MNU people for calling Van der Merwe a traitor. They were going to harvest his organs while he was ALIVE!!!! His father-in-law sent him to District 9 to get rid of him because he didn't like him and couldn't think of another way. I was even mad at his wife for a while but she redeemed herself at the end. He was only trying to do his job and he got hurt in the line of duty and his company turned on him.

What's disturbing is according to imdb.com - "All the shacks in District 9 were actual shacks that exists in a section of Johannesburg which were to be evacuated and the residents moved to better government housing, paralleling the events in the film. Also paralleling, the residents had not actually been moved out before filming began. The only shack that was created solely for filming was Christopher Johnson's shack."
From what I've seen in documentaries and other films, the trading of food and weapons that was in the movie actually happens in real life too. The gangs rule the slums. People dig through the trash to find food. Kids are taken away from their families and tote guns on others. The "prawns" were like art imitating life.

If you think about it, if or when aliens come to this planet, the theories expressed in this movie will be, in essence, correct. Their technology will be far more advanced than ours is. We'll be wondering a lot about them and will hope to study them...and unfortunately, in doing so we'll probably kill them.

Would I see it again? Actually, probably
Would I add it to my collection? Only if it was given as a gift...I probably wouldn't buy it for myself.

#27 District 9: I kill 3 humans, watch out for me.

2009. dir. Neil Blonkamp, starring Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood, David James, Jason Cope.

Seen it before? No.

This one comes to us all the way from South Africa, where an alien mothership has parked over downtown Johannesburg. (It's not quite as big as the ones from Independence Day, but same ballpark.) It's full of aliens that are kind of half-human, half crustacean, half-insect. This particular group of aliens appears to be the worker drones - they don't know how to fly the ship, so it just hangs there in the air. Eventually the humans have to get the aliens out of the ship, and set up a shantytown for them to live in... which becomes overcrowded and crime-ridden, so the corporation running things sets up a larger, crappier shantytown far away from Johannesburg. The guy placed in charge of it, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, who is apparently not a professional actor... in fact I've never seen any of the people in this movie in anything else) gets in way over his head. Mayhem ensues.

It's a pretty good sci-fi movie. I think there was some sort of allegory about apartheid or something, but I lost track because they had these cool alien weapons that made people's heads as-plode.

Position on the list: 104
South African swear words I learned from this film: Doos, fooken, bliksem