OneAndOneIs2

When I first came out to LA a couple months ago, there were posters on some of the bus stop seats saying "For humans only", which I found odd. Even for America ;o)

It was an ad for District 9, of course. And I have to say, it was one of the more intelligently-run ad campaigns for a movie. It was good enough that I went to see the film without knowing anything about it, beyond that it was a film abut aliens being on Earth and not welcome.

I saw it, and you know, I'm still not sure if I thought it was a good film or not... The shaky camera work was mostly unnecessary and motion-sickness-inducing; and the plot left too many questions unanswered.

The rest of the post contains spoilers.

Follow up:

So you've got, I think they said in the film, nearly two million aliens. They have all kinds of advanced technology with them - weapons, robot suit things, the anti-grav ship...

I can believe that there was something in the mechanisms that meant that only an alien could activate it. Fair enough. But the fact that this made us utterly unable to get anything useful out of it, and in fact made us utterly uninterested in it, is nonsense. You don't have to be able to fit into the driver's seat of a car to be able to find out how an engine works. Their gadgets might have had 'triggers' that we couldn't 'pull', but it should still have been possible to reverse-engineer the mechanisms themselves to some extent.

Humans want to get rid of the aliens. There was an alien down there who was capable of flying their ship away. Why did he spend 20 years scavenging fuel instead of just saying "Hey guys, want me to solve your problem?"

The aliens on Earth were apparently all the worker-bee class - they were unintelligent, unimaginative, do-as-they're told types. The ruling class had apparently died out. So why was the lead alien character so smart and independent? Either he was a really intelligent drone - which is self-contradictory - or he was one of the surviving ruling class. In which case, why wasn't he ruling? He had one sidekick and his son. After 20 years. Even the dimmest bulb should have been able to work out a way of getting a supply of catfood and offering it in return for bits of useful technology.

But the two things that REALLY bugged me and were such glaring problems that they hit me whilst I was watching and couldn't be ignored:

Firstly, humans want to be able to use the alien weapons so badly that they've experimented on aliens, and are willing to kill and dissect a mutating human. They've got millions of aliens that will apparently do anything in return for tins of cat food. Why, exactly, given twenty years to think of it, had no humans come up with the idea that they could just recruit a few aliens to shoot their enemies?

Secondly, the fuel. Oh, the fuel...

It wasn't clear whether the alien needed the fuel just in order to get up to the mothership, or to power the mothership as well. In either case, there's problems:

If it was just to power the shuttle, he spent 20 years finding enough fuel for it, when all he needed was to give his kid 10 minutes to hack into the mothership and tractor-beam them out of there.

If it was to power the mothership as well, then the mothership was apparently out of fuel. Even though it had been floating just fine for 20 years. In which case, we have to assume that they had brought all the mothership's fuel down with them. And then lost it all, scattering it all over the place. Or maybe they ran the mothership completely out of fuel. In which case, all the gadgets they brought down, all those little hand-guns and assorted other widgets, apparently contained in them enough fuel to power that enormous mothership. That's on a par with trying to power an aircraft-carrier using only the gunpowder contained in the bullets it carries. It's daft.

And as for the fuel being a mutagen capable of turning a human into an alien but leaving his motor responses, neural pathways, and brain information intact.. just don't even go there!

I was also annoyed that it ended where it did. It was an unusually thought-provoking, intelligent film for an alien sci-fi flick. It raised a lot of interesting questions.. and then ended without actually answering any of them.

Overall, I think it was a pretty good film. But it needs a sequel. And that sequel has to intelligently answer the questions that the first one raised. If it can do that, it'll make the first film excellent. If it just ignores all the questions and intrigue in favour of big special effects, it'll be as crap as the Matrix sequels were.