2009 horror, dir. Neil Blomkamp, Sharlto Copley, David James; IMDb /
allmovie. The
people who don't look like us have to be moved on.
You can be subtle about your message, or you can be heavy-handed.
And this is a very South African film about the South African flavour
of racism, though it goes some way towards universalising it. The
alien ship arrived, and was full of directionless aliens and
ultra-tech weapons which the humans couldn't use and the aliens
wouldn't; so the aliens live in a shantytown in Johannesburg, and now
it's time to move them further out of sight.
When this film came out many of my friends praised it very highly; but
while I don't mind a low-budget look, I do like a bit of nuance in
my storytelling. Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley in his first
acting role) is a minor functionary who just wants to get on with the
job, blind (wilfully or otherwise) to the suffering he causes, and
ends up on the aliens's side… more or less? But other than one action
right at the climax, everything he does can be explained just as well
by his own self-interest: yeah, when his former friends are hunting
him to carve him up into a treatment to let their troops operate alien
tech, he's less in favour of them and by default more in favour of the
aliens. That doesn't take a great moral shift to achieve.
Combine that with a second half that looks like footage from a
computer game, complete with shaky-cam and gun-cam and the obligatory
vehicle sequence, and I found myself rather disappointed. As a
low-budget actioner it's not bad, but it holds out a promise of much
more, and then does very little with it. There are some good moments –
for example when mutated Wikus has been testing various alien weaponry
on a firing range, and his employers put an actual live alien on the
range for him to shoot and he suddenly can't avoid realising what sort
of organisation he's helping – but even that is undermined by a
standard Peter Jackson messy wet explosion. (Jackson organised
financing and other resources for this film after the Halo film he'd
planned to produce with Blomkamp directing got stuck in legalities.)
It's all right. But it's very forgettable.
As usual if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
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