Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

I just saw District 9, and it is good. In a nutshell, I’ll say that while it retained some of the depth and subtle references to real-life issues of its previous incarnation, the movie was probably influenced by the moneymen to appeal to a wider audience. However, halfway through, it sort of lost its focus and became more about the funny-talking man’s desperate bid for survival, rather than the aliens. Regardless, the action scenes are top-notch, and a lot more heart-pounding than the rubbish so-called action movie guru Michael Bay churns out.

See, there are two key elements for any action scene to be good. The first is style and the second is fragility. Style can work on its own, as it did in the movies of Jackie Chan, Equilibrium, Matrix 1, Ip Man and many others. However, for a truly good action scene, fragility is far, far more important. The sense of impending danger, injury, death, pain and helplessness, if properly transmitted to the viewers, will make any car chase, robot fight or even gun battle, far, far more exciting. Good examples are war movies/series such as the Band of Brothers and of course District 9.

District 9’s action/battle scenes have little style, and are very gritty, with lots of 2nd-person (which is rather unique, you have to check it out to know what I mean) and shaky cam. Despite the main character having a mecha to pilot, he gets raped because he can’t bloody turn on the magnetic shield function, since he didn’t have the instruction manual. People do die, and die ugly with plenty of flying body parts, which is a lot more realistic than many other movies where bullet holes are clean.

I can discuss the finer points of the film’s story, and how it uses the prawns as a metaphor for mankind’s disdain of outgroups but I thought the movie wasn’t as intelligent as it promised to be, so there’s not much to talk about. There are some little things, which I felt applied to humankind in general, like how all prawns get English names for easy identification, exactly like how Indonesia forces all its Chinese citizens to change their names to stupid Malay names which basically spell out their Chinese names. The first 15-30 minutes of the movie was a lot more thoughtful than the latter half, which was basically a great action movie.