Alive in Joburg

I hunted this short down after watching the trailer for District 9. And you have to hand it to Blonkampp for avoiding a plot-driven mess that this movie could have made. It's interesting to set the film in South Africa as well. The many perceptions throughout Alive in Joburg creates the questions needed to ask about these aliens that are genuinely terrifying in appearance. And the open-ended finale can be finally touched upon 4 years after Blonkampp began this. Does anyone think Blonkampp has the chops to handle Halo if District 9 works out? The short and the trailer would have you think so, but honestly, let's wait for August to continue that debate.

Good blend of CGI and journalism type hand-cam stuff. Most of the things we see look realistic, except the aliens themselves, since makeup is still very expensive compared to CGI. Seeing Independence Day style ships hover over Johannesburg was probably the coolest part.

In terms of plot feels very short and a little rushed, but nevertheless shows some promise for Neil as a special effects guy and possibly a director. The movie is an obvious jab at apartheid and the irony in humanity. Various black people who not two decades ago where themselves oppressed react with fear and suspicion towards the aliens.

It's available on the Internet, so you should check it out. It will be interesting to see what Neil can do with larger projects.

A documentary looking back a decade whenever aliens arrived in the already divided city of Johannesburg. The film shows the modern day enforcement action being taken against the inhabitants while also interviewing the original residents of the city as to why the tensions and divisions are only getting worse.

I cannot remember how I stumbled into this film but I suspect it was as a result of the buzz surrounding director Blomkamp and some of the projects he has been associated with of late. Set in South Africa the film is a strange mix of social commentary, sci-fi and special effects. So we get an impressive (for the budget) gunfight with a robotic-style alien combined with heavy linkages between the treatment of the aliens in the film and the treatment of blacks within South Africa. It is quite cleverly done but not as clever as some have suggested here. The metaphor is a good one but it is perhaps not as subtle as I would have liked and, even at 6 minutes long I still felt myself thinking "yeah, the aliens = black people, I get it". I am being a bit harsh on it of course and this "failing" (my words only) is not that big a deal.

Even if this aspect is a bit obvious, the "message" is not overly rammed down our throats but rather left hanging there. I would have liked it to ask its questions more obviously to the audience to force you beyond the simple message and make the audience question their own view on the aliens. Personally I did have a bit of a thought process about supporting the action against the aliens and I would have liked the film to guide me more down this bigoted path before pulling me back and confronting me with my own thoughts – as it is though the script is not smart enough to make that happen to the degree I would have liked.

Blomkamp's direction is good though and I did think that the budget was well used in the effects and the way they were delivered (the use of news style footage helped cover the limitations of the effects at some points). Overall then an interesting but perhaps too obvious film that delivers it message in a solid manner but didn't confront and challenge me as a viewer in the way that it could have done with more subtly and guile about it.

It is easy to see Neill Blomkamp's directorial skills in this short film, which runs kind of like a news broadcast documentary that gives a peek into the frightening situation in a South African town after some not so pleasant aliens have set up permanent residence there. It is a kind of journalistically objective look at how the lives of the local townspeople have been altered, mostly for the worse, by the arrival of the aliens. Visually, it is a stunningly effective film, especially with the mother ships floating just over the skyline, and the film is packed with one unsettling image after another. Having been signed on by Peter Jackson to film the highly anticipated screen adaptation of the wildly popular video game Halo, it is easy to see from this film why he was chosen despite having almost no directing experience at all to take on what will surely be a hugely popular film.

What an amazing short movie. As other reviewers have stated, the movie does manage to convey a feeling of racism not between humans but the racism that occurs towards these squid-like aliens. It was a very real and effective message that creates a metaphor that sometimes only fantasy can convey.

This short has gained attention recently because the director was chosen by Peter Jackson to direct the movie adaptation of "Halo". For those of you unfamiliar with the game, this is the perfect man for the job.

For those of you looking for this movie, it can be easily found on Video.Google.Com