The sci-fi thriller District 9 made its money back over the weekend, earning an estimated $37 million (in the United States alone). Given that first-time film director Neill Blomkamp made the film on a $30 million budget, the rest is gravy. District 9’s initial faux-documentary format provides the audience with a dizzying amount of information about some things, but leaves other aspects of the story intentionally ambiguous, so the film raises questions that may not have answers. It also features some of the most staggeringly (in)convenient coincidences this side of a 19th century melodrama.
1. Why is the protagonist-Prawn called “Christopher Johnson?” We’re meant to figure this one out for ourselves. Since the aliens derisively-nicknames “Prawns” speak in that click-language, they probably cannot pronounce human languages like English. One can only guess that either Prawns pick perfunctory human names to satisfy the District 9 bureaucracy, or that humans impose mundane names on Prawns against their wishes. It’s like totally like those Ellis Island stories of immigrants having ethnic names changed to something blandly American.
2. So what happened to the alien ship in he first place? This is one of the deliberately vague questions. It’s not meant to be clear why, exactly, the massive alien mothership came to Earth with a huge population of malnourished Prawns. One of District 9’s talking-experts theorizes that the spacecraft could have been a portion of some other, larger ship that malfunctioned in some way calamitous way. I saw an on-line discussion that theorized that the Prawns have an insect-like society, and and the Prawn population that arrived on Earth were the equivalent of “worker ants” left confused with the death of their “queen.” I’m not sure how much the film supports that, but it helps explain why the Prawns seem so “uncivilized” by human standards.
Unlike some robot and/or mutant-based summer blockbusters, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Princeisn’t riddled with plot holes that you can laugh at while picking popcorn kernels from your teeth. Steve Kloves’ adaptation hews closely to J.K. Rowling’s novel, with some notable additions (particularly the Death-Eater attacks) and subtractions (see below). Most of the post-Prince nit-picking involves discrepancies between the book and the movie, and speculation about the final two films to be made of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Warning: this may contain minor spoilers based on the Deathly Hallows text.
1. What was up with Draco Malfoy’s dad? The opening scenes imply that Lucius Malfoy is under some kind of investigation for the attack on the Ministry of Magic from the previous film. Have charges been filed? Is he on trial in absentia? Do Draco and his mother even know where he is? The details seemed a little vague, given his importance to the Draco subplot.
Director Michael Bay’s concerns (elaborated in a famously misspelled email) that Paramount under-promoted Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen turn out to have been misplaced. The film’s opening broke records and it’s five-day gross comes second only to The Dark Knight —- and the Batman movie had the advantage of not totally sucking. At any rate, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen begs many questions, some of which are probably explained if you know the two decades of Transformers lore.
1. The Internet Movie Database “goofs” page for the film already lists dozens of continuity mistakes and factual errors for the film — but most movies have those, no matter how good or bad they are. However, one sticks out so blatantly that most reviews I’ve seen have mentioned it:
When Jetfire is reactivated at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, he blasts open a hangar door and steps outside, the exterior shot showing him and the other protagonists being in the “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona – the opposite end of the country.
Having taken such pains to establish the characters in the Washington, D.C. area, it’s a blatant disregard for continuity (sort of like the way night falls in a matter of seconds in X-Men: The Last Stand). Can this be explained consistently within the movie? Does the Center even have airplanes out front? In the movies alternate version of America with alien space robots, could the layout be a little different? Jetfire has teleportation powers, as shown by the subsequent scene, but when he uses them he makes the humans violently ill, so that probably wouldn’t explain it.
Given that the previous Terminator movie, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines made $150 million and the first Night at the Museum made $250 million, I guess it’s not a surprise that Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian beat Terminator Salvation on their opening weekend. It’s still kind of like seeing Ben Stiller kick sand in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face. I wonder, with three previous movies and one TV series out there, if the Terminator market is pretty saturated already. Which begs the first (non-spoiler-y) question about the new movie:
1. Just how many time-lines are there by now?There are at least two. According to the original Terminator, “Judgment Day,” when self-aware military defense program Skynet launched a devastating attack on humanity, took place on Aug. 29, 1997. T2: Judgment Day attempted to avert that disaster, but according to Terminator 3, the heroes only postponed the robot holocaust, which began on July 24, 2004. This puckish whiteboard tries to explain it, but muddies the waters even further. I can’t say I noticed anything in Terminator Salvation that directly contradicted Terminator 3 (apart from the obvious recasting), but it’s getting pretty darn confusing. And this doesn’t even address “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”
3. New Star Trek movie blasts off (Based on the franchise’s view of the future, we’d hoped for non-ass-burning jet packs by now. Since we can’t have those, another cinematic spin-off will do.)
After four days in release (counting late shows on Thursday), J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek is now the fifth highest-grossing installment in the 11-film franchise. One of the clever notions of the new Star Trek prequel is that it uses a time travel plot device to justify alterations in the franchise’s continuity, but that doesn’t mean nits can’t be picked.
1. This isn’t really a spoiler, because it involves a scene from the trailers, in which young Jim Kirk sees the Enterprise being built in the Iowa shipyard. Now, I can see the advantage of building spaceships on flat plains (they obviously don’t need to build space ships on coastal dockyards) but don’t they build starships IN space in the 23rd century? I seem to recall shipbuilding and repairs taking place in “spacedock” in the franchise, because some of those starships aren’t built to land. This is the original teaser trailer:
The sci-fi thriller District 9 made its money back over the weekend, earning an estimated $37 million (in the United States alone). Given that first-time film director Neill Blomkamp made the film on a $30 million budget, the rest is gravy. District 9’s initial faux-documentary format provides the audience with a dizzying amount of information about some things, but leaves other aspects of the story intentionally ambiguous, so the film raises questions that may not have answers. It also features some of the most staggeringly (in)convenient coincidences this side of a 19th century melodrama.
1. 