Missed opportunity at greatness

Rating: 4/10 (19 August 2009)

I, too, failed (yet again!) at not falling prey to the hyped up reviews posted herein, and hoped for maybe (what if? what if??) another memorable science fiction experience on the big screen. One of those wrong scenarios ensued - I got interested and invested in the story from the beginning, only to be "let down" by the sheer simplicity, occasional stupidity and apparent storyline holes later. And that is my conclusion after all of this mess - what a great story this could have been, but...wasn't. Yes, it will earn the money, maybe they'll get to shoot the sequel...but the history will not blink half of its eye over this one (or two, or three, or whatever number of sequels, which will be positioned only to squeeze a dollar out of a cgi-explosion-gore hungry teenager of these days...).
It's laughable to read here how this film is on par with "Alien", "Blade Runner" (excuse me?), even "Matrix" (huh??). These people are either on the District 9 studio's payroll or have never seen the movies mentioned.
In any case, what worked great was the set up for the story and the hanging spaceship above the city, plus the story being told initially through the camera crew. Apart from that, the story line had some problems, which the director tried to cover up with lots of explosions, ugly looking aliens and looooots of amunition. (Not since my childhood viewing of Schwarzenegger's Commando or Rambo movies had I seen this many bullets all flying astray...) Character development in the main protagonist was difficult to comprehend - from the initial government bureaucrat cretin (trying to swindle the signatures out of the unsuspecting "prawns") to a hero against the whole system, his strongest motivation being his desire to return to his wife (whose character portrait was not so much than a 30 second shot of her showing a rather tacky gift she received from her husband once). At that point, the story begins to loose its 'classic' feel and starts to become more and more silly. The second call between Wikus and his wife was the most weakly executed "hero" motivator I've ever seen on screen. From that point, there are apparent places in the story where the writer just patches it up to move it along. Later on, we are served another facet of the story in the desire of the father-son duo of aliens to return to the mothership, which felt like thrown on top of the story at the last minute. There are stoppages in the middle of battle scenes, where the heart-spilling dialogues take place between Wikus and the alien, and one is left to wonder - where do these guys take all that time for it? Mind you, the action scenes and breaks in them can be done very well...but not in this movie. Ludicrous is the final chase in which Wikus escapes in the armoured robot shell, while the alien friend runs along, covering himself with a dumpster cover, all the while an elite commando of sharp shooters wastes about 500 kilos of ammunition on them. And they manage to stop, and say their good byes and then the alien is off, whoosh! Then, as the robot shell gets destroyed slowly, the robot itself spews some black vomit, as if it was Wikus being shot. And I am thinking - why is this robot vomiting? A scene that could be written in a hundred different styles, yet, the writer opts to show us...a vomiting robot. And that is the stuff, where the writer confuses his audience for a bunch of bobble-heads and wants to take them for a ride. Had I know I am going to see another "Iron Man", I'd be prepared and wouldn't mind this. But this film pretends in the beginning to be something a little different.
Had this story been developed with a little bit of more intelligence, and rather more classic sci-fi twist, the author had a shot at an "instant classic". In this case, the good beginning was turned into a mediocre action packed chase, with some weak spots in that as well.