District 9
I watched District 9 recently. This movie is shockingly unbelievably good. The movie is very raw; it grabs your attention and sucks you right in the middle of the action. I was screaming, “Oh! F**k”, “Holy Crap!”, “Oh! Shit!!”, “Damn!”… well, you get the picture. The plot & storyline is very engaging.
I’m not going to write a review of this movie for 2 reasons. First, I don’t want to ruin the fun for you. And secondly, I’m confident that you have heard some buzz surrounding this movie – alien, racism, apartheid, prawn, Peter Jackson etc.
Here’s my very very strong recommendation, if you are planning to watch only one movie in a cinema this year (and the rest on pirated DVDs – I know Malaysians too well) – that movie has to be this – District 9. You will not regret and you can thank me later.
Usually, after watching a movie (any movie), I’ll google the movie to discover and learn all sort of fascinating trivia surrounding the movie. Here’s what I’ve learned for District 9. First stop, some statistics on District 9:
- Release Date: 14th August 2009.
- Running Time: 1 hour 53 minute.
- Production Budget: USD 30 million.
- Opening Weekend Gross: USD 37,354,308 – movie cost is covered (but not the marketing cost yet).
- RottenTomatoes: 88% (as of 21st August 2009).
- IMBD rating: 8.8 – ranked 29 in Top 250 (as of 21st August 2009)
And now, we move to the juicy parts.
- The director of this movie – Neill Blomkamp (and not Peter Jackson) was born in South Africa.
- The title of the movie is a reference to District Six, a former inner-city residential area in Cape Town, South Africa. The district was declared a “whites only” area by the apartheid government in 1966, and the population of 60,000 forcibly relocated to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres away.
- The initial premise of the whole film is based on the Short Film Alive in Joburg (2005), written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, which depicted in a a documentary-style the struggles of social interaction between aliens and inhabitants of Johannesburg (“Joburg”), South Africa.
- 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.
- The idea of the prawns being obsessed with cat food came from two inspirations. In impoverished areas of Johannesburg, Neill Blomkamp would see people selling cheese poofs and other snack foods out of large 3-foot tall bags and wanted the aliens to have a similar cheap food. The decision to make them cat food came from one of the producers who used canned cat food to bait hooks when fishing for prawns in Vancouver.
- After the feature film based on the Halo (2001) (VG) video game series which was to be directed by Neill Blomkamp fell through, producer Peter Jackson went to Blomkamp and offered him $30 million to make whatever he wanted. The result was this film.
- According to Peter Jackson, District 9 was born “the day Halo [the film] died.”
I know that I’m not a movie critic, but I’ll give this show 9.5 out of 10. The 0.5 short from perfect 10 because, I successfully predicted 3 “what will happen next” while watching the movie. It is after all Hollywood folks, I saw those 3 things coming. Nevertheless, this will not stop me from watching this movie for few more times.
Sources for District 9.
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