I don't like the "shaky-cam" craze that's been going around. Frankly, it makes me motion sick, and really detracts from the movie. The style can help bring people into the moment of the film, and getting the right things on camera while making it look random has to be rather complicated. The style breaks half way through from there being a cameraman behind the shaky-cam that the actors talk to and interact with, to just a shaky camera during private moments, but I can see how that is necessary to tell the story. I just get way too sick to enjoy any of the cinematography.Putting my eminent puking aside, the movie was exciting and entertaining at the surface level, which is the only point of some types of movies (*cough Transformers). However, I tend to expect a little more from my serious science fiction in general and Peter Jackson specifically. So after the movie was over and the theatre had stopped spinning, I looked back on the movie in my head and was quite disappointed with what I found.
I couldn't think of anything in the movie I hadn't seen before. Big floating saucer-like mother ship? Seems familiar. Bug like aliens? Too many to name. Big war machine robots? Again, too many to name. Big bad private corporations doing secretly evil things? /yawn. Private security forces answerable to no one? Hand in hand with the previous one. Even the slums, riots, gang violence, and forced migration all tasted like things we see every day.
I was expecting to see a thoughtful, in-depth geopolitical screenplay about what impact aliens would have on the world stage. Turns out, that's not what Jackson had in mind. Instead we get a very small, biased view of what was going on, and that frustrated me. It was only later I discovered that what I was expecting, and wanting, wasn't new either. I wanted a Star Trek, or a Mass Effect.
So with all that in mind, and quite a bit of help from my girlfriend, I tried to find out what the point of the movie was beyond its entertainment value (of which there is plenty). And I think the point is, none of it looks new. We've seen all this before. Just because it's aliens being oppressed and misunderstood doesn't mean things will be any different. The movie is commenting on the fact that even if there WERE space aliens, we as a race and a culture probably wouldn't treat them any better or different than anyone else we don't like or don't want around. Pretty grim, but I think that's the message I got out of this movie.
There are a few things you have to take on faith, and since this is a film, and not a documentary, that's perfectly fine. The first is that I doubt the world powers would let South Africa handle the first ever immigrants from another world. And I doubt that control over their assets, technology, and health would be handed over to a private corporation. I don't know whether there'd be a slum or not, but if they were here long enough, without being blended into the general population, it seems quite likely.
Bottom line is, I liked this movie, and I think most of you will too. If you can get past the motion-sickness, some of the shots are really quite great, and it does a nice job of blending live action with CGI believably. Go see it, and then tell me what you think.
-Ty
Pic via Teaser-Trailer
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