Should Have Sent A Poet: A Review of 'Avatar'

“It’s the biggest, the most spectacular, the most expensive, and it will reign supreme,” they said. And yet the crew of the H.M.S. Titanic barely had time to warm up the toasted sandwich makers before everything went aft side up. Big, brazen, bold, declarative: these things speak of folly, the debunked legacy of an infinitely scaled modernist perfection. Such monoliths tear through neighbourhoods, crush the individual, and perpetuate themselves at the altar of capitalist production. It is human nature to want to see them fail. So what to make of the most expensive film ever made?

‘Avatar’ cost a reported $500 million. Whether this fully takes into account the staggering marketing budget, the cost of creating new camera equipment and digital effects programs, or the tertiary expenses of kitting out half the cinemas of the Western world with projectors capable of coming within spitting distance of the reels, is all immaterial. Taking the figure as a given, the math works out as follows: ‘Avatar’, running at 162 minutes, costs $3 million per minute. Yet, in a world where David Schwimmer gets a cool mil every time he acts like a berk for twenty minutes, that isn’t all that staggering. So phrase it this way: my annual salary could buy me just over half a second of this film. A first class flight to Australia converts to less than a single frame. (And if the factoid that each of these frames involved no less than fifty-seven man-hours of work is accurate then the average wage of someone working on the production was $37 an hour.) Maybe the scariest part is that a Tom Cruise cannot be blamed for gobbling up forty or so million of it – whatever you may say about stars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, ‘box office sure things’ would not be top of the list.

So what has all this been spent on? The film is screened, where available, in 3D, and was filmed using cameras designed by the writer, director, producer, and contributing editor James Cameron. Much of it takes place in what can only be an entirely digital environment; but unlike the glazed-over narco-scapes of Jar-Jar-period George Lucas, the world of ‘Avatar’ is competently, comprehensively and wholly realistically drawn. The result is something somewhat staggering to behold.

In the 2150s humanity has found a far-off planet with an incredibly valuable natural resource. Eager to mine as much of it as possible, a base is set-up on what is tellingly labelled Pandora, and the local inhabitants – blue humanoids called the Na’vi – are dealt with first diplomatically then combatively. Our guide is Jake Sully, a marine who by a strange turn of fate is called in to pilot “a remote-controlled avatar”, his consciousness downloaded into a Na’vi body with which he can explore the hostile climate of the planet and interact with the even more hostile inhabitants.

If an audience member were themselves hostile, they could criticise the film for being the dry run for a computer game. The environment of Pandora seems, on the surface, like what we have seen before, with its lush forests, cascading waterfalls, exotic creatures, floating islands and the like. But Cameron – an aficionado of deep-sea diving and the life forms that can be found there – has created a nearly-believable eco-system based on tropical climates, energy transference, and bioluminescence (although personally I could have done without the six legged horses). These images are so breathtaking as to edge towards indescribable. The fact that they start to feel almost pedestrian towards the end of the film is its own strange achievement.


When Aragon took to the fields before Minus Tirith to fight the good fight in ‘Return of the King’ he always seemed to bob on top of the ground below him, and his interaction with his foes was somewhat wobbly. No such criticisms here, the digital environment an integrated part of the world on display, rather than a show-stopping splurge as in the ridiculous ‘2012’. For all the “breakthroughs” and “bar-raisings” of the past fifteen years, Cameron has offered the first genuine revolution in the extensive use of CGI.

That he links this revolution to the 3D format is particularly canny. ‘Avatar’ was my first 3D film, and indeed the first of its kind to offer the entire running time in three dimensions, rather than just selected, ‘Wizard of Oz’-esque moments. From the first scene of the marines being woken from hyper-sleep, medical technicians drifting across the frame and the corridor they’re all in seeming to extend out the back of the cinema screen, the audience is immersed in a way that could not previously be experienced. For all the knives shoved towards the camera and swooping through tree canopies it is the quiet moments in which people just sit in a room and chat that the format is most engaging, allowing you time to absorb what amounts to a wholly fresh cinematic experience.

This has always been one of Cameron’s strengths, from the groundbreaking T-1000 of ‘Terminator 2’ to the sinking titular ship of ‘Titanic’. It could be expected of such a man that his stories would be clinical devices for the delivery of his brand new toy, and indeed when scripting ‘The Terminator’ he made a list of the ten things the biggest grossing films ever made had in common (presumably including #3. The violent death of Bill Paxton and #7. Comedy Austrian accents). Yet the quasi-Proppian formalism such thinking breeds has led to narratives constructed with such care that they cannot fail to entertain, even as they wholeheartedly fail to surprise. Perhaps the vital ingredient amongst this almost ceremonial deployment of story elements is that of the feminine: from Sigourney Weaver’s amped up heroine in ‘Aliens’ to Jamie Lee Curtis tearing the sleeves off her dress in ‘True Lies’ (and all via Linda Hamilton’s conversion from 80s airhead to 90s Unabomber in the first two Terminators), women tend to have their say around James Cameron. Here it is the Na’vi Jake falls in love with, the hunter-warrior Neytiri, whose portrayal by Saldana is one of the hidden strengths of ‘Avatar’: expressive, gestural, and invested with a dignified emotionality, she is a brilliant counterpoint to the occasionally dim-witted and goofy Sully. Just as Ed Harris’ anguished screams when confronted with the corpse of his ex-wife in ‘The Abyss’ make up for much of the stilted nonsense in that film, so the gale-force drama on display here is considerably more convincing than the expositional necessities.


The most bluntly entertaining character in the film is inevitably the villainous Colonel Quaritch, a military man in the mould of Duvall’s surf-obsessive in ‘Apocalypse Now’ or Nick Nolte’s Homer-reading megalomaniac in ‘The Thin Red Line’. The role is oversized and ridiculous, but at the same time entirely believable. As played by Stephan Lang (in a second stand-out part of the year, after playing the man who shot Dillinger in Michael Mann’s ‘Public Enemies’), Quaritch is fearsomely single-minded and bullish individual unburdened by the cognitive dissonance that affects other Cameronian antagonists. Drinking from a metallic coffee cup he congratulates his brigade’s efforts at genocide by saying “the first round’s on me tonight.” The wider cast of human extras is also impressive, looking as they do like real people in real roles rather than central-casting professionals, or embarrassed day-players larking in front of a green screen.

There are qualms with some of the subtexts. The film encodes imperialism as a wholly white male pursuit, while the Na’vi are played entirely by Black and American-Indian actors, as though spirituality and Gaia-awareness were solely the privilege of the under-privileged, and Sully’s journey were not so much learning about another culture as shucking off the burden of white power and ‘going native’. Two of the converts to the needs of the Na’vi among the human classes are even conspicuously non-white. (Indeed, when considering the infinitesimal role of racial minorities in Cameron’s films a simplistic pattern evolves, and that is before one gets to the white-marines-against-black-aliens Vietnam allegory of ‘Aliens’.) There is also the disturbing lack of irony in the presentation of a movie that could only be created by a massive corporate entity like Twentieth Century Fox pedalling a message of eco-awareness and anti-imperialism.

As my viewing companion underplayed after the screening: “there’s certainly a lot there”. ‘Avatar’ may be a behemoth of spectacular construction which worships technology and by-the-numbers story-telling, but it is also a genuinely pioneering work of art. Whether it will usher in the new age of a new medium (if not a new message) we can only wait and see. For now, go see it, and let yourself be amazed.

22 Things I Learned From '2012'

1. Doctors wear scrubs all the time, even when at home.

2. Ex-wives may trade up financially, but never emotionally.

3. Mega-earthquakes and clouds of super-heated ash always move just slightly slower than John Cusack, altering their speed as necessary. Tsunamis are a somewhat different matter.

4. Leaving your children alone when camping while you have a chat with a mentally unstable man inside his trailer is perfectly acceptable parenting.

5. In three years time Paris Hilton will be married to a Russian Oligarch.

6. Shifting tectonics and the reversal of the earth’s poles in no way impairs the navigation systems of Russian cargo aircraft.

7. Eastern monks drink milky tea.

8. Two lessons training as a pilot is more than enough.

9. Car horns are louder than supervolcanoes.

10. When briefing the President about cataclysmic temperature changes it’s considered bad form not to check out the first daughter.

11. The Chinese put a bewildering array of cameras on their vessels. These cameras have microphones and function underwater.

12. The apocalypse unfolds without a drop of blood spilt.

13. Limousines have fantastic suspension, steering, and acceleration.

14. Several days into the end of the world, with all governmental infrastructure destroyed and most cities wiped from the face of the earth, it will still be possible to get a cell phone signal.

15. The dog always makes it.

16. Seeing a tidal wave crash nearer and nearer is not dramatic enough – a prominently placed clock ticking down the seconds until impact is also required.

17. With seconds to live it’s more important to let your friend know he has failed you than embrace your family.

18.The balance of power truly is moving towards China.

19. Novels that end with the line “…and we all realised we had relatives in Wisconsin” are destined to only sell five hundred copies. They will also take exactly twenty-seven days to read, and be considered alongside ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ as a great work of literature.

20. Dangling a giraffe from a helicopter and careering it through a frozen tundra will not in any way impair its health.

21. Watching various American cities tumble into the earth's core like God sweeping the remains of last night’s dinner into the bin is rather entertaining.

22. The fact that it goes on for 160 minutes is not.

Crap-o-Nine Tale: The Nine Most Disappointing Things About ‘9’

In an undefined mid-twentieth century post-war milieu nine puppets invested with a curious life force must defend themselves from a rampaging mechanical force. A late-teen oriented CGI film produced by Tim Burton which apparently allows its metaphorical imperative to override all other customary fallbacks, what could possibly go wrong? Plenty, it turns out. Of the many frustrations, here’s my top 9:

1. Given the almost limitless possibilities of an entirely digital environment, the film offers an almost dazzlingly dull array of shot reverse-shots.

2. There’s a fat henchman used for comedic effect.

3. The highly impressive mise-en-apocalypse (a mixture of World War Two landscape, H.G. Wells threat and J.R.R. Tolkein geography) is left increasingly unexplored.

4. Martin Landau got about three lines. Unless he played one of the dead bodies, which he might have done for all I know.

5. Ten years since ‘The Matrix’, twenty-five since ‘The Terminator’, a whole eighty since ‘Metropolis’, and still the level of discourse in this sort of thing is “them machines be evil”.

6. And, given the above, there is no sense of irony in the fact that the whole film is structured around mechanical characters, has as its deux ex machina an electronic MacGuffin, and was created entirely on a computer.

7. The dialogue consists entirely of context-free heroicisms: ‘I have to do this’, ‘I can’t do it alone’, ‘There’s still a chance’, ‘We have to go back’, ‘Run!’. It’s like watching a Michael Bay film with all intervening dialogue concerning something other than a basic physical task removed.

8. Director Shane Acker doesn’t seem to know what an allegory is, let alone how to put one on film.

9. As a concept, it’s incredibly interesting. As a film, it’s unremitting dross.

Notes Towards an Exploration of Space in Contemporary Action Cinema

Space has become fragmented. Blame Jason Bourne. Or possibly Jean Baudrillard. Jittery shots, quick editing, the desired response of dazzled confusion. Renowned (but occasionally doddery) film theorist David Bordwell calls it “intensified continuity” – the phenomenon whereby contemporary films feature a considerably shorter average shot length than ever before. More shots, more cuts, more action. As a result, the environment through which characters move becomes increasingly difficult for the spectator to map.

Some films respond by collapsing their existence towards a singularity. Paul Greengrass, a British director formerly involved in painstaking you-are-there recreations of such tragedies as Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, uses intensified continuity as a precision-tool of great dramatic and artistic effect. The set-piece in Waterloo station in Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum is the nadir of this form, the splintered world created through meticulous but frantic shooting and cutting a demonstration of the protagonist Jason Bourne’s lack of history (thanks to amnesia), but total grasp of his immediate situation even in the face of extreme pressure (thanks to relentless government indoctrination). The train station becomes his entire world, and the film depicts an attempt to grasp this vast space with something close to simultaneity. Attention is fleeting, jumping from this face to that, from the security camera to the exits. Waterloo station is depicted as fragments of vital concentration, not a coherent or meaningful entirety.




This is the postmodern environment as sensory barrage. There is a similar tendency in the television series 24, with its incessant and unenlightening split-screens gesturing towards an awareness of the wealth of incident, character, and information that accompanies the most cursory event. However, the constant pandering to the lowest attention span undoes such efforts – entire episodes seem to consist of a chain of people phoning each other and re-iterating the same conversation, without the creators or writers suggesting an awareness of the ‘Chinese-whispers’ potential of such a scenario. Space for Jack Bauer may not be highly structured, but it is entirely manageable.

Detailed mapping and navigation in this sort of drama seems impossible. Plots packed with incident keep moving, flitting from place to place, offering neither characters nor audience purchase on the surrounding environment. Nowhere better is this trend examined, and indeed parodied, than the most recent outing for James Bond, Quantum of Solace. Concluding in a bizarre hotel in the middle of the desert (indeed, there are few scenes in the film that do not take place in hotel rooms, lobbies, anonymous corridors or sleek performance spaces), the setting is a meaningless, depopulated postmodern space. As the hotel itself is unconnected from a metropolitan, or even rural surrounding, so too the sections of the hotel itself fail to cohere. The central space of the hotel, across which walkways are suspended in mid-air, is like something from a science-fiction film.

Even the destruction of this site by multiple explosions, previously such an easy fallback pleasure of action films in the 80s and 90s, is undercut by the nonsensibility of the devastation. In the finest shot of the film, if not the entire series, the villain flees from an explosion as it bursts through a wall and shatters a room-spanning sheet of glass; the space may be hollow, but the only way to understand it is through action. What was previously inert and functionless (the room, the glass, the hotel itself) becomes dazzling in its beauty and its dynamism. Spectacle and excitement become tools with which to explore the meaning of architecture, and our interaction with it.




This re-examination of a space once inert made ferocious is used to great effect in the thriller The International. Extended sequences in Milan, New York and Istanbul successfully ingrain themselves with the cities they visit without excessive sequences of “local colour”. The centrepiece in Frank Lloyd Wright’s coiled Guggenheim museum (shot for the most part inside a 98% to scale replica built in Germany) offers initially the use of architecture-as-backdrop, as detectives follow an assassin up the rotunda where he is to meet his handler. The installation on display is a plethora of cinema screens showing occasionally stagey, occasionally vibrant scenes. The backdrop of the set itself is littered with further backdrops.

When the bullets start to fly the space is radically transformed. Balconies become shooting galleries, walls become shields, punters become collateral damage, and museum pieces become deadly weapons. The audience is rushed away from the ramp, into a staircase, then back to the rotunda. Our awareness of the environment, previously one of quiet (museum-like?) contemplation becomes one of life-or-death sensory necessity. The last shot of the space is a slow track forward and pan up, asking us to see how our awareness of the building has changed, progressed, clarified. Unlike the shifting mass of people and camera movement of Waterloo, this architecture is built from the ground-up within the structure of the scene and the shots that compose it.



Creating his own environments to explore, James Cameron frequently offers a meticulous recomposing of these spaces as his films cross their halfway point. In The Abyss, set almost entirely aboard an oil platform based on the ocean floor, a tour of the intricacies and layout of the rig is interwoven with the narrative during the first hour and a half. When an accident cripples the vessel, and a visiting Navy SEAL team turn against the blue-collar crew, this knowledge is redeployed as a potential for salvation. Reviewers often term this sort of action “hard-earned” – those who paid attention earlier are rewarded by a comforting feeling of awareness and security. Inversely, it is the cardinal sin of any narrative for a solution to be offered that has no preceding conditions for its existence (the plotting equivalent of the fight scene in which the hero triumphs at the moment their plight seems most dire by kicking their attacker in the genitals). Titanic actually shows the sinking of the ship twice, first in one of the early scenes aboard a salvaging vessel in the modern day, as an aged survivor is lectured using a rudimentary computer program as to what damage the iceberg did, and how the subsequent flooding of the compartmentalised sections of the hull led to the front of the ship sinking, the rising of the rear section, the tearing of the ship in two, then subsequent vertical dragging down of beneath the waves. Later, when a far more advanced computer program depicts the same events, there is no need for an over-calm character explaining what is occurring, or expositional shots of the hull under water. “What’s going on!” asks Rose to her lover: “I don’t know” he replies. But we do. The spectacle of action is only offered after forensic enquiry and two hours of dramatic action exploring every deck, engine room and cabin.

Space, then, does not have to be fragmented to be explored. The Waterloo Station of The Bourne Ultimatum exists in shards, while the hotels on Quantum of Solace seem not to exist at all. The Guggenheim of The International is scrutinised and given a new life, while the self-created spaces of James Cameron films exist as lined-up dominoes for thrilling set pieces. The action film offers a method of dynamically exploring architecture, turning what could be merely a backdrop into a tangible environment which can be mapped in a variety of unexpected ways.

Rules of Engagement: A Review of 'Lions For Lambs'

Of the swathe of ‘war on terror’ films that were released in 2006 and 2007, ‘Lions for Lambs’ is perhaps the most pressingly of-the-moment, and is unapologetic about this immediacy. ‘The Kingdom’ happily subsumed any political ideas beneath a whitewash of villainous wahabi militants and massive gun battles. ‘Rendition’ conceived of terrorism as force that was at once powerful enough to fracture the space-time continuum, and pliable enough to be overcome by Reese Witherspoon’s marital earnestness. Robert Redford’s film by contrast can proudly be likened to a particularly good weekday issue of a newspaper made celluloid, and a broadsheet more incisive, potent and naïve than any currently in circulation.

When I first saw the film two years ago I did not think much, at the time derisively calling it the kind of script that would be written by the characters on display in Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived television show ‘Studio 60’: an over-eager primer in political awareness which fatally allowed itself to be petrified by what it saw as awe-inspiring ambition. As ‘Studio 60’ improved with reconsideration, so has ‘Lions For Lambs’, and between them they offer something of a sub-genre of American entertainment which attempts not so much a deconstruction of life in that country but a studious awareness that deconstruction may just be impossible in the current climate of necessary patriotism, 24-hour news tickers, and accepted societal segregation.

‘Lions For Lambs’ may be two years old, but with its assessment of failure in Iraq, media bias, fallen soldiers in Afghanistan, and the very real possibility of a nuclear Iran, it remains as contemporary as today’s instalment of the six o’clock news. It strives for these issues to be more than just references upon which to hang some other, conventional drama, but rather constructs them as the drama. In an early scene in a base in Afghanistan, a commander begins his briefing to the troops by telling them to ask questions and take notes: the film, too, is intended as a prompt, not a lecture.

Which begs the question, what exactly is it prompting? This seems obvious: “they bank on your apathy” says a college professor, condemning both the self-involved governmental bureaucracy and the electorate which fails to open its eyes. The film preaches that politics is not another planet, but rather that our actions can be part of the political process. Whether this is followed through in the conclusion of the drama is another thing. The journalist being given an exclusive scoop from a slick senator about a new military offensive in Afghanistan suffers a crisis of conscience, realising she is little but a corporate cog in a machine for propaganda delivery. However, the images of her staring wistfully out the back of a limo at the White House, the Vietnam memorial, and Arlington cemetery, fail to say much. One story strand sees two college kids enlist due to their desire to connect with the world around them, and make an appreciable difference; despite this, the film bends over backwards not to explicitly valorise military service, even while persistently praising the boots on the ground. It’s the same old story: war is young men dying and old men talking (and women reporting).

The film has an energy which is born of September 12th 2001. The wounded aftermath is evoked several times, and it is clear that Redford feels he too was swept up in an undignified lashing out which led, step by step, to what the film understands as the debacle of Iraq. To answer the earlier question, the film is prompting engagement. No bad thing to promote, but no effort is expended to parse the echelons of involvement: America lashed out at the middle east after the towers came down, and in ‘Lions For Lambs’ the youth of America is ordered to lash out at the establishment that banks on their complacency. (For a piece of entertainment so avowedly political, the drama remains at home. We may watch two soldiers stranded in the mountains fend off dozens of Taliban with dwindling ammo, but these scenes are merely the emphasis placed on the dialogue about this initiative, and the response of the American public to it.)

Conceived of, directed, and written with simplicity in mind, ‘Lions For Lambs’ has a singularity of purpose which is bracing. It may not be a call to arms, but it is a call to attention, and whether you consider it to be a success or not, a large-scale Hollywood production with three A-list stars (Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep) produced with this level of gloss that desires little more than to reach just one person, just prick up the ears of one individual who might both try to improve their conduct and be in the position where this might have a positive impact on if not the global stage then American life, is truly a thing to marvel at.

Magic Beans: A Review of 'The Brothers Grimm'

It is saying very little to claim that the work of Terry Gilliam is anarchic. ‘Brazil’, his best film, is a meanderingly scattershot exercise in existential paranoia. Oddly, the time-travelling paradoxes of ’12 Monkeys’ afforded him his most fully formed work, as the myriad of quirks on screen were simultaneously explained as psychological derangement and temporal reverb. ‘The Brothers Grimm’, under the over-watchful producing hands of the Weinstein brothers at Miramax, is an attempt to ground these flights of fancy on an even more rigid blockbuster format: ironically, given a subject matter that plays so directly to the gallery of strangeness, Gilliam is stricken by an insidious imperative to conform.

Set in what is tellingly described as ‘French occupied Germany’ in the early years of the nineteenth century, the film offers a fictionalised supposition about the lives of those famous purveyors of fairy tales without which Lacan and Propp (not to mention kindly, plagiaristic Uncle Walt) would be left somewhat stranded, as tricksters inventing monsters to slay, for which they receive the gratitude and pay of the townsfolk. These early scenes – the entire first thirty minutes, in fact – are something of a struggle, like a Monty Python sketch performed by an amateur company who have no idea how to end it, so just keep going.

For those who nail themselves to their seats, things improve considerably when the brothers arrive in Marbaden, recruited to discover the mystery of several missing young girls, presumed to have been abducted by con-artists in their own vein. A general vibe of thrown-togetherness lingers, but the energy level rises, and the film starts to complicate its conceit by engaging in an intriguing dynamic concerning imperialism, partisanship and myth, alongside the expected nods towards the narrative and storytelling process. Considering the spectral events occurring in the marginal village to be a threat to the French empire, General Delatombe (who would surely have been Napoleon, but Gilliam was not so brave as Quentin Tarantino to re-write historical continuity) configures those who believe in fairy tales as a threat to imperial unity and infallibility. Superstitious townsfolk become wood-bound freedom fighters. An interesting comparison is there to be made between ‘The Brothers Grimm’ and the latter two installments of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, which adapted a singularly manufactured exercise in theme park entertainment into a vicious attack on the fascistic enterprise of the East India Company.

Of course, this dynamic happens on the margins. But then, everything in this movie seems to happen on the margins. It’s nothing but margins. Which is why it is unfortunate that the last twenty-minutes are so rigorously bolted to a template of heroic empowerment, unmasked evil, and triumphant gallantry. I may not have read the Grimm fairy tales particularly closely, but I don’t remember many fistfights. Gilliam’s unsteadiness reveals itself in the fleetingness with which he deploys his most striking images: a white horse falling through a dark forest, a child with the features of her face removed, the fragmentation of a character whose skin is a mirrored façade.

One has to take pleasures where one can then, especially considering the horrible cinematography which confuses plasticised rot and awkward camera movements for atmosphere and suspense. A pleasure indeed is the performance of Matt Damon, whose Will Grimm is a womanising, self-aggrandising jerk. Damon always makes his quiet superiority a hindrance to his characters, but here displays a comic timing and energy which is much appreciated. Heath Ledger’s Jacob is, perhaps, less successful, although I concede that it may be the case his bumbling, bookish brother is potentially a more impressive piece of stagecraft. No argument can be broached in the case of Peter Stormare, as an Italian torturer, and Jonathan Pryce as General Delamorte: both are unremittingly terrible, clowning around like drunk uncles at a party they don’t fully understand or care to try.

What does ‘The Brothers Grimm’ teach us? Nothing at all about the siblings themselves, and very little indeed about their work. It taught Gilliam to stay away from similarly top-heavy projects for some time (he has been quoted as saying his great work only happens when he has to fight something during a project: it seems the Weinstein brothers were too great an opponent, and their marketing-over-creativity fingerprints can consistently be glimpsed draining the life from the picture). Perhaps the best thing to learn is that any kind of adult Harry Potter-esque japery is doomed to failure, and this sort of thing should be left to the children (and grown children) for whom subtext is one text too many.

Alien Zone: A Review of 'District 9'

In hindsight, perhaps the oddest thing about ‘District 9’ – and there are so many very, very odd things to choose from – comes not from the film itself but the manner of its marketing. London residents will no doubt have seen the phone boxes emblazoned with faux-warnings to “non-humans”, a campaign which is effective, but also clearly something of a triage manoeuvre, a response to the lack of any name actors and the strange stylistic affectations that begin the film. What is odd about this street advertising, as well as the trailer and poster, is that the film itself is stuffed (over-stuffed, really) with digital creatures, massive explosions, running firefights and gory deaths: exactly the kinds of things that sell movies, but here come as something of a surprise.

In the manner of Brian DePalma’s ‘Redacted’, the first act uses documentary footage and interviews to sketch out a world in which a massive alien spaceship has come to rest above Johannesburg, the immigrants on board interned into an unpleasant slum near the city, mistreated by officials, and economically abused by Nigerian warlords. So far, so bracing. The staging and cutting of this first act, while not wholly convincing, certainly grabs the attention. Considering the allegorical tone the low IQ levels of the aliens (insensitively called ‘prawns’) is potentially offensive, but the bureaucratic, ad hoc, and callous response of the South African government is invigoratingly realistic.

Slyly, and almost imperceptibly, the film shifts out of this documentary mode, but is still filmed in a hand-held, naturalistic manner, even while the plot becomes increasingly formulaic and hole-ridden.

Touching heavily, but not probingly, on issues of immigration, racism, and (non-existent) corporate humanity, ‘District 9’ suffers from indulging in its own baser instincts. Several dozen people are violently eviscerated in the course of the staggeringly action-packed second half, and the influence of producer Peter Jackson begins to be felt in the ‘Braindead’-esque zaniness of the combat, as well as the continued punishment metered out to the protagonist (indeed, for all the prosthetics on show, Sharlto Copley’s transformation from hapless office lackey to hapless action hero is the most spectacular).

The acting and effects are grounded in a way that gives the running-jumping-shooting an excitement not found in, say, the ‘Transformers’ films, but director Neill Blomkamp seems overly enamoured of this advantage. Watch the film expecting a rich tale of racial antagonism and you will, ultimately, be disappointed. Better to expect a piece of blockbuster entertainment which fudges together ‘The Office’, ‘Alien Nation’, and ‘Battletech,’ which – bizarre as it sounds – just about works.