io9 
Enter your username and password.
San Francisco, 4:49 AM
Tue Nov 24
25 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors: tips@io9.com
Editor-in-Chief:
Annalee Newitz | Email
News Editor:
Charlie Jane Anders | Email
Associate Editor:
Meredith Woerner | Email
Assistant Editor:
Lauren Davis | Email
Weekend Editor:
Graeme McMillan | Email
Contributors:
Joshua Glenn
Stephen Goldmeier | Email
Ed Grabianowski | Email
Austin Grossman
Paul Hogan | Email
Lauren Davis | Email
Chris Hsiang | Email
Lynn Peril | Email
Ann VanderMeer
Alasdair Wilkins | Email
Graphic Designer:
Stephanie Fox | Email
Interns:
Tim Barribeau | Email
Julia Carusillo | Email
Alex Eichler | Email
Cyriaque Lamar | Email
Caitlin Petrakovitz | Email
Mary Ratliff | Email
Josh Snyder | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
08/16/09
08/16/09
@spikespeigel: Wilkus goes through some very messy medical complaints (sometimes played for gross-out laffs) and the alien's energy weapons have very...visceral results. No slo-mo fireballs or long lingering shots with buckets of fake blood. There is a CGI air-pig attack.
Blomkamp's violence is very quick and sort of realistic (for a film about aliens), gorier than your average SF action thriller but not nearly as repulsive as the violence in Snyder's Watchmen. Does that help?
08/16/09
08/16/09
The movie sort of implies that "Christopher Johnson" was actually one of the few (possibly only) "Leadership caste" prawns that somehow managed to survive (i.e. he actually knows how their computer systems work, and he articulately interacts with the MNU agents coming to evict him...other prawns say "What is eviction?", he looks at it and says "This thing can't possibly be legal", to which Wikus notes that "okay, he's a sharper one than usual...")
08/16/09
Further, on a purely technical note, the alien special effects are so advanced that they *actually look real* (it helps that they bothered to make each of the aliens look slightly different)
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
.
I'm in the "no sequel" camp, for the record.
-Kle.
08/17/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
I can't wait to see District 10: Revenge of the Prawns, and there will be tons of unsold D9 action figures left over at the local BigLots overstock store...
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/17/09
I want the METAL GEEEEEUUURRR?!?
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
Judging by the amount of TV ads I saw for this, that'll be true here. Even with the cost of TV ads going down, and cable ads costing less anyway, they invested heavily in promotion.
08/16/09
08/16/09
Intriguingly, his staunch supporter Peter Jackson has a parallel with his early days featuring lots of physical and puppet effects — there’s definitely resonant kinship there.
As a result in Blomkamp’s work, we get the "WOW" factor which gets the desired and focused attention, as opposed to the wrong kind of reaction which goes "Oh geez, another CGI monster?" The effects support the story, instead of distracting from it.
And, all that ties into resourcefulness — I'm interested to hear what wise budget moves Blomkamp took during making this.
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/17/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
GI OhNO! was taunting folks (critics) in commercials this week touting it's the numba WON movie this week. A 68% drop from last week tells me that word of Suck is killing it and/or there are only so many who would actually pay money to see it. Looks like the force of Suck is a stronger force than GI Joe or Cobra.
I'm going to see D9 next week.
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
08/16/09
One of the points of the movie was his ability to overcome that conditioning and start to see them as they really were and, do something about it. I'll stop here - don't think I've spoiled anything.
08/16/09
Throw that kind of guy into a battle arena and watch how he reacts.
08/16/09
I thought the movie kicked ass though, even my wife enjoyed it, which suprised me.