Mystery and intrigue were dripping from the alien’s mothership in the third episode of ABC TV’s V reboot. Well, not literally, but follow me: Last week’s episode had an overall them of “you can’t trust anyone.” This week’s installment not only continued that theme, but offered some surprising examples of it in action.
For a movie whose title references the most sinister level of encounter with an alien life form — abduction — The Fourth Kind should probably have come with a modest “buyer beware” warning.
That’s because the film is less about getting prodded and probed by little green men than it is a test of what we are willing to believe and be frightened by. As The Fourth Kind opens, actress Milla Jovovich addresses the audience directly, telling us that what we are about to watch is based on a series of strange occurrences that purportedly happened in Nome, Alaska, during the first week of October 2000.
James Cameron’s Avatar doesn’t hit theaters until December, but that hasn’t stopped hyped-up fan boys and girls from getting excited now. With a wall of secrecy around the project, the desire to see something (anything!) from the flick is at such a fever pitch that a free ticket giveaway today for a special preview of the film throttled the Avatar website.
Be sure to check out Alive in Joburg, the short film that inspired District 9. And for reviews of all the summer’s biggest movies, go to CL’s Movies & Television site.
Somewhere near the middle of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, corporate bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) and his alien friend Christopher Johnson blast their way into the headquarters of an evil multinational corporation known as MNU in search of the only trace of fuel left on the planet that can get Johnson home. The pair turns wave after wave of MNU security goons to jelly using an assortment of alien weapons before locating their prize and making an explosive getaway with an army of MNU’s finest in land-and-air pursuit. District 9 isn’t a video game adaptation, but watching the movie I kept thinking that it might as well be.
Virally marketed to hell ET flick District 9 will be invading multiplexes next Friday. I’ll have a full review of the film in the paper and online next week (first impression: good but incomplete and a bit nonsensical), but for now you can get primed with a look at Neill Blomkamp’s short film, Alive in Joburg. This short caught the eye of Peter Jackson, who hired Blomkamp to direct the now-defunct Halo movie. When Halo went belly-up, Jackson decided to give Blomkamp the cash to make a feature out of his cool little short. I can tell you that District 9 is a far more evolved take on the material in Joburg (it’s amazing what a few million dollars will buy you), but the short film retains a charm all it’s own. It’s also a good set-up for the feature.
Full video after the jump …
(click button for feed)
(follow us on Facebook)
(follow us on Twitter)