Howard Stern saw it a couple weeks ago and has been raving about it. He loved it.
Not presumptuous, sane. If someone has gone to the effort of travelling interstellar distances, it will have been to do something worth the effort. If they didn’t give a damn about our own existence they wouldn’t bother dropping by.
I saw it tonight. I liked it a lot. I thought it was a very inventive and affecting take on the “alein invasion” genre. I did think there were things that didn’t really make all that sense (like how did the humans and the prawns understand each other), and aspects of the story were cliched (man persecutes X. Man becomes X. Man atones, becomes defender of X), but I still thought it worked as both an absorbing entertainiment and an effective meditation on xenophobia (and the xenophobia was clearly widespread among all humans, it wasn’t just an “evil government”).
It was a million times better than crap like Transformers and G.I. fucking Joe.
You might ask the mods to put the above in spoilers. For what it’s worth:
I think after 20 years of the gov’t officials having to constantly deal with the Prawns and vice versa, they were able to both learn each other’s language out of shear pragmatic convenience. Turns out the Prawns were far more intelligent/advanced than we were… we just had the upper hand, as they were caught at a huge disadvantage that took them 20 years to overcome (apparently something went catastrophically wrong with their life support during their incoming trip). An even then, only enough for a couple to return home to get some support. District 10 anyone?
And there are good odds that it’ll have sweet frell all to do with us.
We saw it on Friday.
I liked it a lot! (My SO, however, hated it.)
I really liked the mocumentary style at the beginning. It was like catching up on a news story on CNN that you may have missed because you were out of town and hadn’t watched television. This sort of got you “up to date” with current events in a realistic manner.
By doing that, it made the rest of the story seem more, uh, believable in a way.
Yes, there were some holes in the story…for instance, wouldn’t you think cat food would be pretty cheap and easy to provide? I believe zillions of people currently find the supply quite ample. Would this have been that difficult/expensive to do on a widespread scale? Yet there was only one gang of thugs who did this and seemed to have quite a cache of advanced weaponry that not a single government agency, worldwide, had an issue with?
And yes, there were quite a few other nitpicks - but all in all, I thought the story was compelling and I think we can at least expect a re-visit in three years.
You are underestimating the costs in time and energy required to travel interstellar distances. There is nothing else worth the effort, except maybe the one-in-a-billion chance that your sun is going to die soon.
Should the microbe I just stepped on think that, since I spent a huge amount of energy getting across the room to step on just the spot where the microbe was living, I must have been there specifically to visit that microbe?
You’re severely overestimating the value of running into humans - or any other intelligent live.
Especially if the travel time is too significant to make regular runs viable - under the theory that it’s so significant, nothing short of possible extinction would make it worthwhile, why would you waste precious - and possibly irreplaceable - resources on uplifting/enslaving/destroying some random species?
If it’s that significant, running into an intelligent species on the planet you go to has more likely rendered your effort wasted. The most value is in finding an inhabitable planet you can build on without having the local species trying to exterminate or exploit you.
Way, way too visceral and violent. Spoiled what could have been a good film.
Oddly, the blood/gore did not bother me, even though normally I’m very put off by over-the-top gore. It did not feel gratuitous to me, which maybe is part of why.
I have a plot question.
The aliens have these unbelievably awesome guns that can blast humans into a fine spray of bloody mist in about a nanosecond. The humans are en fuego to figure out how to replicate these weapons. And yet the aliens are trading these mega-awesome weapons for cat food and tires. Why don’t they just…y’know…USE the weapons? Even if they can’t get back home, they could at least negotiate for some better digs, or something. If I had a mega-awesome-human-puree-o-matic, I definitely wouldn’t put up with living in a shack and getting kicked around by the ugly bags of mostly water on a regular basis.
[spoiler]Yeh, I think what happened is the first arrivals were so malnourished and ill when they first arrived (because of failed life support), they were in no condition to to fight for anything. They were immediately sequestered into District 9. And over the 20 years, they bred and their numbers drastically increased into the tens of thousands. I can’t remember if they said how many Prawns were on the mothership when it first came though, but I imagine the numbers were much smaller.
Once they got back on their feet, despite their advanced weaponry, any uprising for food and shelter (let alone all out war) would have meant the extermination of them. It would be them and their limited number of weapons against the population of the world. Also, as time goes on in conditions like that, becoming organized is an uphill battle. Their weapons were verboten by the MNU (but also coveted), and so they were kept under the black market to trade for their cat food, which was basically a drug for them. Something like that.[/spoiler]
OK, I can buy that.
Various plot synopses have said that there were nearly one million starving, disoriented “worker bees” on the original ship. IIRC there were 1.8 M at the time of the forced relocation 20 years later.
Edit- spoiler-boxed that, just in case…
I enjoyed it up to the point where it became a fairly standard quick-cut chase and shoot-em-up. I got a laugh when I read the Slate review–they compared Wikus Van De Merwe to Michael Scott.
I know! I can’t be the only one who watched the credits to see who played Christopher.
As far as MNU wanting or not wanting to kill him - they didn’t want to kill him when he was on the run (until the one merc finally had enough). They did want to harvest all of his biological material while he was still alive, which would as they mentioned, have the side effect of killing him.
Also, the mecha suit isn’t deus ex machina since they introduced it earlier on. It would be foreshadowing, if anything. DEM would be if some heretofore unintroduced tech saved them.
Just read that the film opened in the number one slot in the US this weekend.
They had predicted it making $25 million opening weekend, but it made $37 million. Pretty damned good for an August opening.
Also read the original plan was to open it earlier - but they decided not to try to compete with Star Trek - probably a wise idea.
Good word of mouth on this one. Also, Entertainment Weekly featured it on the cover last week and gave it a nice multi-page write-up, which I’m sure helps.
I will likely see it again next weekend, just because I saw it with my mom and sister last weekend, and now MrWhatsit wants to see it, too. I’m game.
God I really don’t want to get into this again, but introducing something earlier doesn’t preclude it from being a Deus Ex Machina.