Thursday, August 13, 2009

New Feature on Peter Jackson and District 9

The Wall Street Journal has published a really interesting feature story on Peter Jackson, his burgeoning "movie making empire" based in New Zealand and the upcoming sci-fi action movie District 9, which Jackson produced and financed.

I didn't have enough time to do a complete write-up on the District 9 footage that was screened at Comic-Con last month and the panel, but I'm finding a surprising disconnect between the trailers and what was shown at the con.  If I was trying to decide to see the film strictly off of the trailers, I'd pass because it looks like a pretty standard alien invasion action flick with a lot of explosions.  While I love movies in which lots of things blow up, District 9 didn't look like anything I hadn't seen before.

After seeing the footage at Comic-Con though, I was surprised to find out that the driving storyline is really that of a human (Sharlto Copley) who's a petty government bureaucrat/spokesman who's infected with a mysterious substance while rooting through an alien's home in District 9.  As he begins to turn into one of the aliens and the government realizes that he's the key to them being able to use and eventually replicate the aliens' advanced weapons, the mutating human has to run for his life.  Now that, combined with the idea of aliens who are refugees on our planet, is a movie I want to go see.  The political and social parallels alone make the movie, which opens in theaters tomorrow, seem intriguing.

Check out one of our high-definition video clips from the District 9 panel at San Diego Comic-Con below.  Visit our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/popwenches to view more two additional clips from the panel—one of them is more than 7.5 minutes long!


[Wall Street Journal]

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