Nice effort, but not that great.

Rating: 4/10 (31 December 2009)

The film could've cut about 20 minutes from the beginning and skipped the whole documentary bit following Wikus around, as well as all the interview bits describing what kind of a good man he is. Instead, they should've just used news bits to say that, and moved right into the story. The film was trying to balance the weird and strange dry humor of the South Africans in the documentary bits, but all those interviews of the people were completely unnecessary as nobody in the audience cares about what they had to say. The film was relatively low-budget for a sci-fi of its calibre and thus I suppose it needed filler to make it the length it is, otherwise it probably would've been about an hour long, which goes to show you that the filmmakers weren't too confident in the stories involving the characters who are actually in the action. For example, the 2 buddies are able to all of a sudden just smash and grab and escape without too much hassle. That scene could've been much more interesting had it explored more ways to bring out the relationship between the characters, including those in the military and the government, and it would've been nice to have seen much more of the city where the building stands! We don't even really find out how they get to the building! They just show up with an explosion, and that's that. The 2nd half is much better than the first, simply because we get to see much more action and sci-fi of the aliens, the ship, the robot and the computers. The story doesn't even explain how that alien battery liquid could've had the biochemistry to transform into what he is. It just happens, and that's it. The whole scene of the surgery is rather unimaginative, as we all know, if that sort of thing happened they would've knocked him out with drugs and gone right ahead with surgery/experiments. Anyway, overall it's a nice effort, but I wished they had not done the whole interview & documentary thing.