5. District 9
What happens when Peter Jackson begins working on a film adaptation for the ultra-popular Halo video game, and then has to walk away from the project after production design, props, and principle photography have already started? Hand over all of the material to Neil Blomkamp and let him work some magic to re-purpose all of the material, including partially rendered aliens and their incompletely rendered space ship into a whole new film. That's what happens... District 9 was a film marvelously recycled-to-completion that could have (otherwise) been an enormous financial disaster. What appear as the aliens in the film, were really uncompleted "Elite" designs from Halo. Various of the weapons are immediately recognizable from the game, specifically the Spartan Carbine, and the Needler. Amazing is not the word to use when it comes to describing what Blomkamp did with this nearly semi-aborted film. This movie displays what I can only describe as a sci-fi racism theme, in full kilter. Where the aliens, known as "Prawns", are living in complete squalor, after "crash" landing on earth seemingly all malnourished and dying. The humans completely control the situation and maintain the prawns in a specific quarantined location, in South Africa called District 9, and they remain here for over 28 years. The interesting breakdown here is simply watching one person, who was part of the government agency maintaining these aliens in slum-like conditions, become infected by a chemical agent that the prawns are desperately trying to keep hidden. A chemical agent that seemingly has taken the prawns decades to distill into a small black-oil like vile of ooze. The obvious and slow hand of oppression begins to creep over Wikus (our protagonist) as he begins to turn into what seems like a prawn. His exit journey from humanity, and going full circle from oppressor to oppressed. While the events of this film are predominantly occurring to an alien race, it is a great reflection of our society in various pockets of the world as they are, almost in direct translation, while giving us a glimpse of possibilities of our own future.
E.F. Camacho
Contributor
I'm a writer, a published author, and editor for a small independent publishing house. I'm an award winning producer of independent media, and I get to edit books, screenplays, and comics in my day to day. I love working on independent film & games, during my down time, as well as reviewing films while gobbling down milk duds (it's an addiction, I know). I've been called "Geek-Prime" among my peers for all the fandoms I work in, and I wear that title proudly. It's a passion, and an exercise in my growing profession, to get to write about what I love. Which happens to be a little of everything. But mostly film, comics, horror, games, anime, literature, and life. I do write about academic material, like politics, medicine, physics, and mathematics too. But for the most part, I like to keep things down to earth and simple. Follow me on Twitter & Facebook
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