Literal snoozefest Demonic is no comeback for District 9 director Neill Blomkamp
Blomkamp's supernatural-horror follow-up to Chappie is no Chappie, either
Film Reviews Blomkamp
Photo: IFC Films
Neill Blomkamp is a walking illustration of how precipitously fortunes can rise and fall (and fall, and keep falling) in Hollywood. The South African VFX specialist’s debut feature, District 9, was the type of overnight success we don’t see too much of these days: an original-concept genre picture (what if we did apartheid to aliens that look like jumbo shrimp?) that scored critical adulation, head-spinning box-office returns, and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, all of which rocketed an unknown rookie filmmaker to the top of the industry’s most-wanted list. Rebottling this lightning proved no easy undertaking, however, as the somehow ambitious and undercooked Elysium put the phrase “sophomore slump” in fans’ minds. After that came the regrettable Die Antwoord showcase Chappie. It made the man, or at least his work, into a memefied punch line, and raised the suspicion that his calling-card triumph might’ve been a right-place-right-time fluke.
Chappie was six years ago, a hiatus Blomkamp spent producing experimental shorts and signing up for Alien and RoboCop sequels that fell through. In terms of showbiz cachet, he’s on the outs but only one good movie away from a potential comeback. That would ideally be his new film Demonic, a smaller-scale horror project doing more with less by leaning on his presumed talents as a technician, freed from the blockbuster bluster gumming up the works. But while Blomkamp does have one impressive CGI trick up his sleeve, he totally drops the ball on the narrative end of things. It’s enough to make a viewer long for the simpler and more immediate pleasures of his filmography, such as being able to point at a screen and say, “That’s Chappie.”
Written in 2019 and shot under the constraints of last summer’s lockdown, Blomkamp’s latest shares the defect of so many COVID-era productions in that it feels thin rather than minimal. Armed with a premise that lends itself to sparse, isolated spaces uncluttered by extras, the writer-director meets the force majeure conditions as well as his modest budget on their own terms instead of trying to conceal them. But the hellacious ordeal faced by Carly (Suits alum Carly Pope) feels underdeveloped, and Blomkamp’s craft isn’t quite virtuosic enough to redeem the clumsiness of his scripting. Our gal’s been summoned by a shady pair of scientists (Terry Chen and character-actor great Michael J. Rogers) to make contact with her comatose estranged mother (Nathalie Boltt) by using an unapproved apparatus that links their slumbering, unconscious minds. So, pretty much the same deal as Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, subbing out the serial killer on the loose for an avian demon tagging along as Carly returns to our dimension.
In the other big point of departure, Blomkamp depicts the mental interiors not as an extravagant fantasy-scape but as real life digitized to resemble a particularly glitchy level of The Sims. Created using a cutting-edge technology known as volumetric capture, these passages render Carly and her farmhouse surroundings as warped virtual approximations of themselves; patches of skin flicker into nothingness, blades of grass stick together, and transparency in the back of her head shows the face backwards from the inside out in an ineffably unsettling effect. Blomkamp’s surreal aesthetic experiment nails the texture of a VR setup in its beta-testing phase; one is reminded that the filmmaker transitioned into directing with a series of short films set in the Halo universe, and that a video game influence has been a hallmark of his work ever since. Without convincing human dialogue to ground it all, however, the innovation comes across unflatteringly as a mere gimmick.
The overall eeriness of the simulation aside, scares are spare. The faint dread takes too long to shift into full fear, and once the homicidal apparition does finally show up, it doesn’t make much of an impression. Blomkamp, a student of action, doesn’t have a strong sense of the rhythms of a solid peekaboo horror set piece, though one possession scene excels solely on the contortions of the stand-in performer skittering around on all fours. Up to the disappointingly inert finale, we can anticipate each move before the film makes it.
Here is a film in which Carly’s BFF clarifies their relationship by announcing “I’m your BFF!” and where conversations end at odd intervals, whenever one participant rules that they “can’t handle this right now.” Though the fraught bond between Carly and her mother has been designed to support the emotional foundation of a cerebral premise, their decades of pent-up animosity have no weight of their own in practice. The two interact like angry casual acquaintances, undermining the “it’s about trauma” rationale that’s provided so many flimsy screenplays an unearned metaphorical heft as of late. Blomkamp’s limits as a storyteller have eclipsed his skills as a conjurer of cinematic tricks for the umpteenth time, leaving us with his dullest and most generic work to date. If there’s a takeaway here, it’s that he may do well to consider directing from a script he hasn’t written himself—to stop tempting his viewers with so much footage of sleeping people.
131 Comments
Honestly given how the rest of Blomkamp’s career has gone, I think we’re a little overdue for an unsentimental reappraisal of District 9. Was the premise audacious? Yes, absolutely. Was the execution good enough to justify going back and re-watching the film? Honestly? Not really? The first third of the movie felt joltingly original, but it was mostly an expansion of his Alive in Joburg short from 2006. Once he ran out of that material to work from, District 9 pretty quickly turned into a generic action shooter: a dress rehearsal for the Halo film he never ended up making.
And since then? Woof.
The mech suit rampage at the end of District 9 remains cool. I also like that the film followed a coward, rather than your typical action-movie moral paragon — he was an interesting character who achieved credible growth by the end of the film. The weird combination of interview/found-footage takes, alternating with conventional movie style, was actually a bit of a weirder decision than I thought at the time — but I think it still mostly works out for the best. D9 is still mostly good, IMO. It’s okay to only be brilliant once.
Like Avatar, it’s a movie that became fashionable to dislike after the initial wave of praise. The truth, as your astute comment communicated, lies somewhere between those two extremes.
I also like that the film followed a cowardWired magazine randomly taught me (at some point after the film came out, I forget) that “Wikus van de Merwe” as a name, is the Afrikaans equivalent of “John Smith”. Not a translation of John Smith obviously, but as in the most generic name a white person can have in South Africa.
I wonder if that’s true…
It’s okay to only be brilliant once
* looks fondly at Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, weeps a single tear *
All the things that made District 9 great continue to be true: smart, original SciFi narrative with great acting, atmosphere, and sense of place. Just because the rest of his films aren’t good (Chappie in Chappie was fun, but the movie itself was a bore) doesn’t retroactively make D9 worse.
I’ve watched it at least twice a year since 2009 and I still enjoy it. The rest of his work though, one and done.
It was The Hurt Locker for people who didn’t want to watch that movie.
I didn’t think District 9 was deserving of all its praise. I thought it was a good enough film that totally fell apart at the end.
Frankly, why? It was very good but not great, and while it definitely felt fresher when it came out, it’s not like it aged that poorly.
This feels like retroactively deciding Harry Potter sucked because we don’t like JK Rowling anymore.
Alive in Joburg was an absolute masterpiece of a short film, and even at the time I found District 9 fairly underwhelming next to it.
I think it got an extra boost from having any sort of political perspective, considering the politics of most sci-fi of the era boiled down to “war bad, but solving problems with violence still good.”
Most Americans, such as the article above, assume it’s about apartheid rather than immigration in post-apartheid South Africa.
I was always pissed that District 9 got a Best Picture nomination when Star Trek was the best sci fi movie that summer and probably deserved it more.
Found JJA’s burner account.
Seriously. “Star Trek” deserved a Best Picture nomination? even if that was the only movie you’d seen all year, the answer would still be “Fuuuuuck no!”
I knew a podcast wasn’t for me when I listened to their episode on Naked Lunch and they said the movie NL reminded them of most thematically was ST09(!), and that they were disappointed it hadn’t received a Best (Adapted?) Screenplay nod.
I get that people find that movie a lot more charming and fun than I do and I don’t begrudge them that, but I’m always baffled that so many find it to be a landmark in high-quality blockbuster filmmaking. A lot of people seem to have been very impressed by the “alternate timeline” thing, even though its clunkily executed and makes very little sense (and its “clean slate” is pretty much thrown away in the sequel, but it’s not really fair to ding the movie for that)
I suppose if you define “Best Picture” as “Most Use of Lens Flare In The Pursuit Of Burying A Franchise,” then maybe.
He’s not wrong.
Star Trek wasn’t even the best half-hearted attempt at continuing a sci-fi franchise released that year (that probably goes to Terminator Salvation), let alone in the same universe as Best Picture.
Nah.
You got me bro, really solid argument.
“Star Trek” 2009 is garbage.
Nah.
At least Into Darkness, dire as it is, has Benedict Cumberbatch.
The concept of District 9 was fresh and compelling enough that many people were able to look past the clumsy execution and total lack of subtlety. It’s a B- movie that somehow acquired an A- reputation.I still think Duncan Jones is more likely to make a “comeback” than Blomkamp. DJ’s post-Moon films haven’t been any better than Blomkamp’s post-D9 work, but Moon *is* a legitimate A- movie.
Source Code is far better than anyone gives it credit for, and heck I’d even put the Warcraft movie in that category, but yeah, it fell apart with Mute – which had interesting ideas, set pieces and visuals, and ehhhhhh….
That Warcraft movie was kind of quaint, it sort of reminded me of one of the higher budget Cannon movies, or any 80s movies where an outsider studio tried to make a blockbuster but didn’t quite have the money or mindset to pull it off. Of course, this was a $160million movie based on a well-established brand, so it shouldn’t be like that at all really, but I guess $160million ain’t what it used to be. I wouldn’t call it good, although it’s not my genre either to be fair, but it did have a certain charm to it.
It was a film missing its last act, apparently assuming there would be a sequel.
Watched that one again a while ago, and you can feel those studio edits with the goal is 2 hours or less in mind.
Source Code is indeed quite good, “Moon” is 10x better than District 9 and, yeah, no director was going to come through a Warcraft movie unscathed. So point goes to Duncan. But I really wish he’d hurry up with another good movie soon. (I didn’t even know “Mute” existed until just now!)
Mute is worth your time if you’re curious, and it didn’t bar me from buying the third entry in the “Mooniverse” trilogy – the comic MADI, but it’s definitely his worst.
Okay. I’ll check it out…eventually.
I was so disappointed in Mute. I like Jones as a filmmaker and had hoped Mute would be a return to form (I don’t blame him for taking Warcraft but that’s not the kind of movie I watch him for). But there’s a certain amount of weird borderline toxic masculine stuff in there (not just the villains, either), male gaze stuff, cheap sci-fi cliche, thin characterization… It made me sad.That said, he’s mentioned that Mute was a story he’d had in his mind since he was a teen. And yeah, what I dislike about it *feels* regressive teenage boy shit.
I think he and Duncan Jones are classic examples of how “we” were too quick in that era to anoint someone an auteur on the basis of a few, sometimes (as with Blomkamp) even just one, decent and promising but hardly seminal early films.
That said to some extent I’m glad they’re still out there doing their stuff and trying new things. Maybe it’ll work one time.
I wasn’t disappointed with Elysium probably because I never rated District 9 that highly—some of that may be me in that I had a hard time with an abortion joke burning a shed full of eggs and thinking that no one would care about burning a shed full of sentient beings. Maybe I’m underestimating racism there though. But mostly I think a not crazy thing would be the nations of the world fighting wars for any alien space-traveling technology, and the idea that it’d just be sitting there was bonkers to me.Also, the last third was Robocop vs Ed209 from what I remember. Fun, but pretty empty.
He’s definitely proven to be a one-hit-wonder (at best.)
District 9 is an apartheid allegory with a bunch of bug aliens, where the ONLY black characters in the movie are literal sharp-toothed monsters that want to eat them. So no, it was never good.
Frankly, why? It was very good but not great, and while it definitely
felt fresher when it came out, it’s not like it aged that poorly. His other movies being bad to horrible doesn’t retroactively make D9 worse!
i really, really wanted to love district 9 but it just fell apart about half-way through. i loved the premise and i thought they did a magnificent job creating that world and the fx were used very well to give it great atmosphere. it’s been at least a decade since i watched it so i don’t remember a lot of the specifics save for the point of the movie where the infected protagonist confronts the warlord bad guy and has a chance to kill him but chooses to let him live. i may be wrong but i believe that at this point in the film this dude has already had to kill in self defense so when he hesitates to toss a couple bullets at this largely inconsequential mini-boss bad dude who was actively trying to catch him i vividly remember being overcome with anxiety cause it was like seeing smoke seep from the engine bay while you’re driving. i immediately realized that this movie was gonna be a good half-hour too long because this dumb fucknugget was gonna let capt. killyou live so that he could trying to catch him like a cartoon coyote trying to catch a meal. the only other thing i remember about this movie is pissing off my friends cause i just talked shit through the rest of this feature length plot hole.
Ah yes, District 9. The 2009 movie where a company man meets oppressed aliens, starts turning into one and ends up fighting his former human comrades. You know, the one with the climatic fight with the mech suit. No, the other one.
I don’t think I even made it through the first third. I just found the presentation so off-putting that I couldn’t bring myself to keep going. I keep thinking I should give it another shot, but then I don’t.
I like Elysium quite a bit, myself, but know I’m very much in the minority. And the less said about Chappie the better.I’m disappointed this seems to be such a big misfire. I was once very excited at the idea of his take on Alien/Robocop, and thought his time away experimenting on shorts would mean he’d come back with some new ideas and hungry to prove himself.
I think his writing is his biggest problem. I loved District 9 until we reached the plot point where a spray turns the humans into aliens. The film ‘jumped the prawn’ for me there.
Speaking of Chappie what was the deal with the 90s Cholo “America” like Di Atwood was weird enough but why is a character from an Edward James Olmos movie hanging around 2014 South Africa? Like I really wanted his whole story more so than anything else.
There are plenty of great directors in this world who do not write their own films. This guy should join their ranks.
And Shyamalan, too.
Shyamalan’s dialogue doesn’t always sound lousy, but it did in Old.
I enjoyed Old, but my God was the dialog piss poor.
There was one section when Mid-Sized Sedan was trying to explain what he thought was going on, and the dialog sounded like he was a 65 year old professor from Johns Hopkins.
I don’t know why M. Night felt the need to try to have the characters all explain what was going on. If they were suitably confused while all the chaos was going on, keep it that way. I get the sense he didn’t want a repeat of how people felt during the ending of The Happening , but he went too far to the other end and turned every character (even those without medical degrees) into Ph.D level professors in time dilation, theoretical physics, and virology.
I think Shyamalan can more easily afford to hire some good script doctors to polish his dialogue than Blomkamp, but he just chooses not to.
It’s almost like most hyphenates are control freak egomaniacs…(half joking)
I dunno, then we wouldn’t have The Happening and Lady in the Water. I’d like to remind you that The Happening has the threatening line of dialogue “Y’all eyein’ my lemon drink?!”
“What? No!”
Personally, I think the vast majority of writer-directors should choose one or the other.
It looks like a dull version of Coma. And Coma is not an exciting movie.
He is making a sequel to District 9, right?
These districts go to eleven.
Ah, a trilogy then.
District 8, the prequel.
That’ll be District 7, because 7 ate 9.
You win!
Two cats, one called “One Two Three” and the other called “Un Deux Trois”, had a race to see which could swim across the river fastest. Which cat won?One Two Three, because Un Deux Trois Quatre Cinq.(Reading aloud and correct French pronunciation required for joke to work.)
All Districts Go To Seven?
‘District Nein’, the German remake.
I mean, the dude was supposed to return in however many years to cure Wikus, right? I had always hoped we’d get a followup on that.Last I read they were writing the sequel.
Its kinda amazing after he made the first one and it was so successful that they didn’t go for a sequel asap. And then again after Elysium failed, and Chappy. Not this? Maybe time to go back to that well before you never get a chance
Cue the Fast and Furious jokes.
This is sad to read. I was kinda looking forward to this one.
Don’t worry, it’ll be great, just because these snotty reviewers and would-be connoisseurs don’t enjoy it doesn’t mean we can’t.
Movie reviewers aren’t sniveling aristocrats anymore. I’d bet you ten bucks Charles and you aren’t very different.
Neill Blomkamp is a walking illustration of how precipitously fortunes can rise and fall (and fall, and keep falling) in Hollywood. I dunno, the guy keeps getting chance after chance after chance. If anything he’s the poster boy for how a mediocre white man can keep striking out and still get called up to bat over and over.
At least Disney came to their senses with Trevorrow, which as zero good movies.
Well, “Safety Not Guaranteed” was at least okay…but that was a classic example of a white male director being given the reins to a billion-dollar franchise on the strength of one okay-ish low budget indie which seems to happen all the time for dudes (Marc Webb, anyone) and
It’s only now just sort of starting to happen for a few women like Chloe Zhao (though she’s made more movies and hers were much better than either of those from those male jokers.)
I’m shocked at this take as not only did Trevorrow direct a movie that made billions of dollars that summer but was also by far the best movie of the franchise (seriously those old Jurassic Park movies are hella overrated). Only misandry can explain such a bonkers take.
Counterpoint: Safety Not Guaranteed was garbage
Fair enough. That’s definitely not a hill I’m going to die on.
SNG is firmly in the category of movies that think they are more clever than they are. See also: Donnie Darko. Heck, they can even fool some people into thinking they are clever too.
Excellent point about “Donnie Darko.” I never much cared for it and people (including the writer) are convinced it’s MUUUCH smarter than it actually is.Considering Richard Kelly’s career turned out even worse than Blokamp’s, I think we can safely say us Darko skeptics were right all along.
However, Trevorrow’s Episode 9 script was light years better than Rise of Skywalker. Does that make it good? Not really, no. But at least it wasn’t an incomprehensibly bad dumpster fire of pure shit.
Literally anyone could have made a better Episode 9 than what was cobbled together out of spite by JJ, Terrio and Kennedy.
I think TROS is not just the worst SW movie of all time, but actually one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. And yet I certainly don’t think it was created out of spite. Well, maybe JJ had some spite for TLJ, since he went out of his way to crap all over it. But, still, that’s certainly an…interesting take.
Sorry, bruh. TLJ made The Book of Henry look like a masterpiece. Just total shit.
Not sure what TLJ has to do with what I said.But since you brought it up, TLJ is the third or at worst fourth best SW movie ever and whenever someone says it’s shit, I know I can stop listening to their opinions on movies forever. So thanks for clearing that up.
You can particularly stop listening to this commenter, as they will work bashing ‘The Last Jedi’ into pretty much any post they write, regardless of prevailing conversation.
Good to know, thanks!
Sci fi movie have women and people of color. Me want sci fi film to only have white guys. There, now shut up about the Last Jedi incel.
LOL. Big brain take. Who writes this shit?You’re just forgetting that sci-fi movie “Looper” is just about the whitest film ever.And “The Force Awakens” featured a female and a non-caucasian male lead, with another non-caucasian heroic male character. So he INHERITED a female lead and he was the one who decided – in his words – to impose a “romantic” and “intimate” interpretation of the Kylo and Rey dynamic, thus sidelining the Rey and Finn relationship set up in the first film.It’s creepy that WHITE DUDE Rian Johnson (who entirely featured white male leads in his past films) has wrapped himself in the Martyr’s clothes of diversity and you don’t have the brain cells to challenge his take. And your commentary wouldn’t be so pathetically boot-licking if you had the guts to acknowledge that Johnson’s connections with Tim League and Johnson’s refused to speak out against the racism and sexual abuse against League’s various companies.In 2016, it was announced that Faraci would leave after a sexual assault allegation came to light. League reached out to the survivor, Caroline, and told her that he had removed Faraci from the company.In 2017, it was revealed League secretly rehired Faraci anyway … or maybe Faraci never left. As Caroline put it, “so, I was lied to and brought into what was essentially a PR scheme … since I never asked for devin to be fired to begin with, or demanded an apology or boycott, I’m just EXASPERATED at how sloppy this is”. League apologised for letting women down.In 2018, a report from Splinter found that Alamo Drafthouse had allegedly minimized sexual assault and harassment made towards both patrons and employees. Rian Johnson performed a mass deletion of his Tweets.In 2019, Johnson performed marketing for the Alamo Drafthouse, recording this advertisement and crafting a programme for them.In 2020, a further expose (this time from The Pitch) alleged abuses perpetrated by both the management at the chain’s Kansas City locations and corporate brass across the business. These include sexual harassment and abuse, racist profiling of customers, unsafe (and often illegal) work environments and even financial irregularities involving ticket sales. “The Pitch reports that despite promises from co-founder Tim League, who embarked on a listening tour of various locations in the wake of the 2017 allegations, little has changed within the company.”
Rian Johnson has failed to challenge a notorious company on their practices and abuses and you have failed to think for yourself.
I don’t we actually know that. We had leaks of some of the ideas but has anybody read the full script? I mean to be fair rise of Skywalker is absolutely the fucking worst. So better is kind of a low bar. I don’t think Colin would be able to make a good movie out of a decent script though
jenny nicholson has a video reading through the whole script.
I read 2/3 of the script (it’s easy to find online.)
It’s…okay. It actually has a few good ideas and uses the entire ensemble MUCH better than TROS. Granted, it was written before the passing of Carrie Fisher, so the whole thing would have had to have been massively rejiggered at a minimum. But it really would have been a much better movie. (which is saying literally nothing since TROS is the absolute worst.)
Trevorrow’s films are absolute garbage (SNG was okay) but when a director’s second film makes 1.6 billion dollars, it’s at least a bit understandable why people might want to give him more chances even if the movie itself was garbage. For big tentpole releases, quality doesn’t matter as long as they can manage to bring money in, and at the time it looked like Trevorrow had that touch.Then The Book of Henry happened, he turned in scripts for Star Wars IX that Disney hated even more than what we eventually got, and he seems to have been relegated to just doing dino movies for the foreseeable future.
If only execs were smart enough to realize that ANY Jurassic sequel was going to do a billion dollars no matter who was directing it. Alas.BTW, it’s not entirely fair to say Disney hated his Star Wars 9 script “more” than JJ’s. It’s just they didn’t have time to fire JJ, too, and hire yet another person to take a swing at it (and JJ obviously has MUCH more clout.)
That’s absolutely not true, Jurassic Park isn’t some built-in IP like Star Wars where there’s a cult surrounding it. It hadn’t been relevant in decades.
If only execs were smart enough to realize that ANY Jurassic sequel was
going to do a billion dollars no matter who was directing it.
I’m not certain that’s true. Opening weekend was always going to be huge, but Jurassic World had legs strong enough to imply that it was more than sheer brand recognition driving things (I mean, it was the third highest grossing film ever at the time of its release, beaten only by the James Cameron duo of Avatar and Titanic), especially since the brand had previously slipped a few hundred million dollars with each subsequent release.There were plenty of ways for the semi-reboot to go wrong, or at least not live up to its (financial) potential, and cinema history is littered with the corpses of sure things that weren’t. I don’t blame bean counters treating Trevorrow like a golden child for being able to give them a product they could push to Third Highest Grossing Film, even if the movie itself wound up being pretty fuckin’ bad. It clearly hit the buttons it needed to hit from a franchise-resurrecting perspective, and that is not something Universal has consistent success doing.
It’s a trash movie. A better JP sequel would have been even more successful. It did the bare minimum.
Jurassic World is the only JP sequel to get a Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Individual opinions may vary, but is a 71% rating really the bare minimum?
“A better JP sequel would have been even more successful. It did the bare minimum.”Hilarious. Both of those films did better than TLJ. Granted, all three of those films are messes, but fair is fair: at least the JW films didn’t actively lose almost $1 billion.
JP 3 made $370 million dollars worldwide, there’s no way quadrupling that take was going to happen no matter what. As for Trevorrow’s qualities, he might just be good at the stuff that’s important to big studios but isn’t necessarily visible on the screen: Bringing films in on time and on budget, being good at taking notes, and generally fostering a good working environment with actors, producers etc.
I’m sure glad he never got that Aliens 2 thing made.
Max Landis will thank Blomkamp to get off his poster.
He made a moderately budgeted huge success, then a huge budgeted moderate success, then a moderately budgeted huge flop, then a low budget horror movie. I don’t really see how that’s loads of chances. He moved up and down the scale in response to the results of his films.
Don’t forget all the franchise/reboot films he was given a crack at and couldn’t get off the ground. The guy’s whiffed a lot more at-bats than those four movies.
You can’t blame him for some of those supposed “whiffs”. His Alien stuff was being developed around the time of the Fox sale to Disney, which screwed up plenty of other “in development” projects. Robocop is a Sony property and they are notoriously gun shy with their IP. (Did you know there were 2 entirely different drafts of a new Ghostbusters pre-Feig that hit green light status before they got cold feet?)Maybe it’s for the best that these projects stalled. But whatever the case for their viability, you can’t point solely to Blomkamp.
Since when did we start holding unmade movies against creatives? That literally happens all the time. Is Bond a black mark on Danny Boyle’s career?
I guess if it KEEPS happening, though, eventually you have to wonder if it’s not just bad luck…
I thought Chappie was… fine? Seriously I’m not sure what got people so upset about that movie.
I hated it at the time, in particular I found it very emotionally manipulative; “cry for the poor robot being beaten up!” I must admit it’s stuck with me though, I can recall it pretty well six years later. So that’s something. I think a lot of people would have been annoyed by the fairy tale logic, especially at the end.
The overall eeriness of the simulation aside, scares are spare.Did you mean “sparse”? It’s okay, typos happen. It’s not your fault AVC regards copy editing as so 20th century.
When they said, “prawns” they were talking about large South African grasshoppers not jumbo shrimp. Even lacking this fact, the disconnect between “prawns” and the insectoid appearance of the aliens seems to have whooshed over most people’s heads.
I always think of Chappie and Elysium as very solid show reels for a man who just wanted to make a Star Wars film.
He really wants to use an existing IP, but keeps on having to resort to original movies. For once, good on you, Hollywood.
Guy peaked pretty early, didn’t he?
Yeah, halfway through his first movie, it’s all downhill from there.
District 9 fucking sucked
I’m sure he is a nice guy.But Hollywood, it’s time to give up on Neill. He is clearly the definition of a “one hit wonder” when it comes to filmmaking. It has been literal, diminishing returns since 2009.
Just here to comment that Elysium was fucking terrible. Thank you for reading.
“Created using a cutting-edge technology known as volumetric capture”.I think I used a shampoo once that had volumetric capture. My hair had never had so much shine and bounce.
(what if we did apartheid to aliens that look like jumbo shrimp?) The aliens in District 9 do not look like jumbo shrimp, they look like giant crickets, because in South Africa, a “Parktown Prawn” is this:Tell your friends.
He’s basically the next M. Night Shama-lama-ding-dong. 1 good film, a few meh ones and then just complete dross.
I haven’t seen any of Blomkamp’s later features, but I would guess that Unbreakable & Signs are better than all of them.
Unbreakable maybe but Signs? I’d rate that at Elysium levels. Seriously why invade or visit a planet that is 70% made up of the shit that kills you? Where every house has a running supply of deadly water? That was just the worst twist.
Split and The Visit were both good films I enjoyed.
In retrospect, I’m shocked that DISTRICT 9 got a Best Picture nomination. That film does not hold up well.
It was the year they expanded their nominee category from a maximum and minimum of 5 to up to 10, and it might have been a sop to the idea that they were out of touch for not nominating movies like The Dark Knight*. It would not have been nominated before then and I suspect it would not have been nominated a few years later.
*Which I don’t agree with, they were really no more “out of touch” then than they have been since at least the 80s.
Much like Richard Kelly and Zack Snyder before him, his first film was his best and the exception to his career.
“It’s enough to make a viewer long for the simpler and more immediate
pleasures of his filmography, such as being able to point at a screen
and say, “That’s Chappie.””That’s a funny line.
Blomkamp and Shyamalan strike me as very similar both are (or can be) very good directors that keep hamstringing themselves with their own scripts. I think both would be better off directing from someone else’s script. Elysium is like 1 more action scene and 1 more pass to tighten the script away from being a pretty fun movie, Chappie is ridiculous but has really interesting visuals and some fun parts.
I hate this movie so I’ll give it our lowest score a C –
Does it end with the main character becoming a demon?
Neil Blomkamp needs to make a Richard Kelly biopic and vice versa. I always group these guys together as one-hit wunderkinds that had audacious, original debuts…and not so much after that. A shame, but unfortunate birds of a feather.
My husband worked with Blomkamp on District 9 and would work with him again in a heartbeat. Fantastic movie that deserves a sequel.As for Chappie? Also a fantastic movie. I think those who don’t rate it are dumb dumbs who bought into the trailer and didn’t adjust their thinking when actually watching the movie. It was devastating to me, and though I loved it, could never watch it again. The way the humans treated the robot was awful and a good analogy for the world. I’ll give this a go, seeing as I don’t agree with the rest of your review.