Danoff
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- 34,431
- Mile High City
Sorry to break the love chain but... it was awful.
...and not just a little bit awful, but one of the worst movie-going experiences I've ever had - ever. Very few movies have made me want to walk out 30 minutes into it in the theater, but this one did. My wife turned to me at about 30 minutes in and said "we can go anytime". I leaned back and said "if you need to leave, I'm on board". We stayed for the whole show though.
I'll post a more detailed review in the "what movies have you seen recently" thread. But I'll explain my problems with the film.
The plot was good. Not amazing, but it was good. It didn't feel like a retread on a retread (though that's certainly not unheard of). It had a plot hole or two, but nothing too absurd. I was appreciating the gritty realistic sci-fi premise, and the intelligent way it was approached.
The acting was excellent. All of the characters in the movie played their parts absolutely perfectly (though there weren't many of them). And the aliens looked and acted great too.
The music was lacking, but it's because of the documentary style that they filmed the movie in. So I'm willing to forgive that.
So the plot was good, the acting was good, the music is forgiven, the special effects were phenomenal. I'm not even going to complain about any sort of political message. So what on earth made Danoff hate this movie so much?
Backstory
I never go to the theaters. But we were going on our second straight evening without electricity (they're still working on it), and we were bored. We decided to go out to the theaters and see a good movie. District 9 got the nod. This was our first theater-going experience since The Dark Knight, and it was so unbelievably painful that it makes me wonder what on earth (short of another electrical outage) would get me to drop >$20 on going to the theater.
The Punchline
It was the good damned hand-cam that killed this movie. I wanted to scream out in the theater "HOLD THE ******* CAMERA STILL!!!!". I swear, every single scene, no matter how inconsequential, had to wobble all around all over the place. 20 minutes into it I thought I was going to throw up. My wife had one hand on her stomach on the other on her mouth. I had to ask her many times if she was ok to continue. We were reduced to watching the movie out of the corners of our eyes. The shaky-cam absolutely ruined this film.
It was bad in bourne ultimatum. In that film, was irritated because I couldn't see the details of the car chase, or an actors face was annoyingly abstructed while he was talking by some sort of out-of-focus blob as the cameraman did his best impression of a 2-year-old with a video camera. But District 9 took it to a new level (and no, I didn't watch cloverfield). It seemed, at times, as though the movie was intentionally trying to get you to puke. I see puke on the screen, I hear it in the speakers, I see it flung around on the screen, and all the while the camera is swaying around trying to make me dizzy. There were scenes where I stared intently at the screen and literally could not make out what was going on because the camera was moving around too much.
If there were a scene in which we were watching grass grow, the camera would have swayed back and forth. In scenes were we were riding in a car, the camera was bumping around. In scenes where a character was running the camera was practically mounted on his elbows so that we were looking at a rock, and then a cloud, and then a rock again. In really vigorous scenes, scenes were people were fighting, you could follow nothing. There would be a face, and then the sun, and then an object of some sort followed by another blurry face.
If I tied a rope to a camcorder and whirreld it around in all directions in my back yard and sent the footage to Peter Jackson, he could have used it at parts of this and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
Only once in my life have I seen hollywood snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in such dramatic form - the final episode of Battlestar Galactica.
District 9: Good plot, good acting, great special effects, good dialogue, crappy movie.
...and not just a little bit awful, but one of the worst movie-going experiences I've ever had - ever. Very few movies have made me want to walk out 30 minutes into it in the theater, but this one did. My wife turned to me at about 30 minutes in and said "we can go anytime". I leaned back and said "if you need to leave, I'm on board". We stayed for the whole show though.
I'll post a more detailed review in the "what movies have you seen recently" thread. But I'll explain my problems with the film.
The plot was good. Not amazing, but it was good. It didn't feel like a retread on a retread (though that's certainly not unheard of). It had a plot hole or two, but nothing too absurd. I was appreciating the gritty realistic sci-fi premise, and the intelligent way it was approached.
The acting was excellent. All of the characters in the movie played their parts absolutely perfectly (though there weren't many of them). And the aliens looked and acted great too.
The music was lacking, but it's because of the documentary style that they filmed the movie in. So I'm willing to forgive that.
So the plot was good, the acting was good, the music is forgiven, the special effects were phenomenal. I'm not even going to complain about any sort of political message. So what on earth made Danoff hate this movie so much?
Backstory
I never go to the theaters. But we were going on our second straight evening without electricity (they're still working on it), and we were bored. We decided to go out to the theaters and see a good movie. District 9 got the nod. This was our first theater-going experience since The Dark Knight, and it was so unbelievably painful that it makes me wonder what on earth (short of another electrical outage) would get me to drop >$20 on going to the theater.
The Punchline
It was the good damned hand-cam that killed this movie. I wanted to scream out in the theater "HOLD THE ******* CAMERA STILL!!!!". I swear, every single scene, no matter how inconsequential, had to wobble all around all over the place. 20 minutes into it I thought I was going to throw up. My wife had one hand on her stomach on the other on her mouth. I had to ask her many times if she was ok to continue. We were reduced to watching the movie out of the corners of our eyes. The shaky-cam absolutely ruined this film.
It was bad in bourne ultimatum. In that film, was irritated because I couldn't see the details of the car chase, or an actors face was annoyingly abstructed while he was talking by some sort of out-of-focus blob as the cameraman did his best impression of a 2-year-old with a video camera. But District 9 took it to a new level (and no, I didn't watch cloverfield). It seemed, at times, as though the movie was intentionally trying to get you to puke. I see puke on the screen, I hear it in the speakers, I see it flung around on the screen, and all the while the camera is swaying around trying to make me dizzy. There were scenes where I stared intently at the screen and literally could not make out what was going on because the camera was moving around too much.
If there were a scene in which we were watching grass grow, the camera would have swayed back and forth. In scenes were we were riding in a car, the camera was bumping around. In scenes where a character was running the camera was practically mounted on his elbows so that we were looking at a rock, and then a cloud, and then a rock again. In really vigorous scenes, scenes were people were fighting, you could follow nothing. There would be a face, and then the sun, and then an object of some sort followed by another blurry face.
If I tied a rope to a camcorder and whirreld it around in all directions in my back yard and sent the footage to Peter Jackson, he could have used it at parts of this and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
Only once in my life have I seen hollywood snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in such dramatic form - the final episode of Battlestar Galactica.
District 9: Good plot, good acting, great special effects, good dialogue, crappy movie.
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