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| our first Sci-Fi Movie |
District 9 the movie that showed South African film makers
that they can go big… International big, Big budget big, Box office #1 big, that
kind of big. District 9 was basically South Africa’s first sci-fi movie.
District 9 was about aliens that came to our planet lost and
they landed in Johannesburg (well their spaceship was hovering right over
Johannesburg for the first time ever aliens had landed somewhere other than America.)
so our governments and others decided to let them stay on our planet, the
governments set aside a certain area in JHB for the prawn-like aliens, it was
called DISTRICT 9. Wikus Van Der Merwe, one of the operatives in charge of
relocating the aliens from District9 to District10, finds an alien container, that
has an unknown chemical in it he gets exposed to this chemical and he slowly
changes into one of the prawn-aliens. He then discovers what our government and
the MNU are doing to this aliens and what they intend on doing with the alien
technology and weaponry that can only be controlled by the aliens and Wikus now
that his DNA is changing alien like. Wikus and Christopher (one of the aliens)
try to stop them while Christopher and his son try to get back home to their
planet.
District 9 was the first sci-fi movie to come from South
Africa, it changed the movie landscape of our country. It moved us away from those
documentary films South Africa is famous for. Our film makers usually made
movies about struggle heroes, movies with serious human issues or comedies,
mainly by one man Leon Schuster, yeah for some time in our film making history
this man monopolized our movie industry… Oh shucks.
The movie District9 set the stage for many films/movies to
follow, it moved our film makers away from making one dimensional movies,
forced them to get creative, soon after District9 we had our first movie on
Vampires in Johannesburg it was called “ETERNITY”, we had cool vampires though,
Then a horror movie about human hunting or smuggling body parts, I don’t know,
Len from Isidingo was in it. Needless to say District 9 opened the door of
creativity in our film makers’ minds and they gave us movies that made South Africans
want to go to the cinema more and moved us away from the bootleg market. Pirating
of movies in South Africa actually around the world is a big problem, but
hopefully more creativity when it comes to movies will push people away from
this trend.
Guess there will be change as time goes by....At-least South african producers tried something that does not talk about our history....Hope this movie will uplift our confidence and produce more movies.
ReplyDeleteit already has, the movie was released in 2008-9.
Deleteoh no wait.. me and my gap year seem to have forgoton that it was actually released in 2009. oops.
Delete