District 9 Moon

This week I only watched two movies. We intended to see a movie today but couldn't quite get motivated - such a hard life...

1. District 9: This sci-fi movie about aliens who are marooned on Earth was disgusting at times and certainly not in my top 30 movies. However, it did make me think about injustice and how horribly we treat the things that we are not familiar with. Also, I was strangely touched by the father-son relationship and the wife-husband relationship. Although I like the movie, I was surprised to find that reviews were quite good.

• Entertainment Weekly gushed about the film (see bold, italicized section here): "Were they not tentacled, claw-handed creatures from another planet with bodies like steel-plated shellfish, the ghetto-dwelling underclass in the madly original, cheekily 
 political, altogether exciting District 9 would look much like any refugee population: They miss home, they're discriminated against, and they're driven by overcrowding, squalor, and hunger to acts of violence that make the local populace hate them even more and wish them good riddance."

• The New York Times summarizes the movie fairly succinctly: "Once a terrible accident befalls [the main human character], we are at his side and under his skin, and 'District 9' subtly shifts from speculative science fiction to zombie bio-horror and then, less subtly, turns into an escape-action-chase movie full of explosions, gunplay and vehicular mayhem"
  

2. Moon: Yet another sci-fi film about one guy stationed on the moon because we (earthlings) are harvesting fuel (or something extremely useful) from the moon. The movie was written and directed by Duncan Jones who is the son of David Bowie. I feel that this is relevant. It seems to make a lot of sense in some way that this movie with this look and feel would be the output of the progeny of David Bowie. This is not to say it's a glam or superficial movie even if the computer in it is extremely reminiscent of Hal in "2001: a Space Odyssey."

• It was refreshing that this was a compelling movie that didn't go over the top. As the New Orleans Times-Picayune review puts it, "there's not one fiery explosion, not one transforming robot, not one spider from Mars. This is old-school sci-fi, a psychological thriller built on suspense, meaning and strong performances." The flip side is a review by the San Francisco Chronicle, which says, "The film has intelligence...But 'Moon' is boring. Agonizingly, deadeningly, coma-inducingly, they-could-bury-you-alive-accidentally boring."

I side more with the Times-Picayune.

Interestingly, both of these movies are connected by the sinister big corporations and corporatism that is ever-present.