From the intriguingly creative ad campaign to the full theater-going experience, this film builds high expectations and blows them out of the water - succeeding in aces across the board in the art of film making. Neill Blomkamp has created a piece that is sure to satiate one's thirst for witnessing as much destruction as possible through heavy action - the last third of the film acts essentially as an extended scene of war - but at the same time accomplishes the absurdly difficult task of imbuing the characters and the storyline with the same amount of heart.
The film most certainly has its shortcomings, and they are worth noting. Stylistically, it's hardly consistent - it opens as a tale told only through faux-archival footage, fit with documentary style interviews and everything - then somehow meanders its way out of this format into a rather normal film narrative shot Cloverfield-style through hand held cameras. Eventually it starts to look like an average Summer action movie, with aliens, before it turns into the opening of Saving Private Ryan. Cut back to the interviews as if you've just abruptly changed the channel from ActionMax to the History Channel. Mind you, up until this point, the transitions have been fairly smooth. But at one point I couldn't help but think that the film just could not make up its mind as to what it wanted to be, aesthetically. It also stuck in my mind how the film convinced me that this general "feel" of movies has so much potential that this film will certainly help to open up, but not completely reach.
But that was before Blomkamp hit us with the film's true emotional punch.
Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell surely faced a significant dilemma going about this ambitious task of a film: How can you make an audience sympathize, as powerfully as possible, with a completely fictitious species that isn't even meant to be native to this very planet? The results were astounding, to say the least. They made the film virtually a study in sociology - illustrating their situation on Earth to be as reminiscent as possible to grittily realistic scenarios of select groups of people in major urban areas all over the world. They emphasized this parallel at the start of the film and developed it masterfully through the climax as we meet Christopher (or something?), the sort of "head Alien" in charge, and not only find his wit and courage admirable but find him easy to root for after witnessing heart wrenching examples of his paternal instincts. The very fact that I'm describing a non-Earthly-language-speaking and rather hideous looking alien in such a fashion is a testament to the development of character Blomkamp and Tatchell were able to achieve with so little to work with.
Brilliant enough as it is conceptually, the way in which Blomkamp executes it is truly where the mind begins to blow. The blood races and heart falls with one look in the aliens' eyes - their sheer pain and horror and fear soar off the screen and pierce through your soul, compelling every ounce of your being to forever keep your loyalty to them. It's that symbiotic relationship between the surface level visual effects and the psychological thematic undercurrents that shows the true-blue mark of impressive craftsmanship. Your eyes surely ejaculate to the visual feast you see before you, but Blomkamp keeps the visual mastery almost as a background note only revealed in the most of its full-fledged glory to serve the story with such restraint that you'd be hard-pressed to have found this whole Summer. This keeps the film so disturbingly naturalistic that the subtlety of the visual effects, which alone is surely among the best I've ever seen in a film like it, hits your senses so unsubtly like a bulldozer when the film exerts the fullest of its visual strength.
Throw in how painstakingly Blomkamp paces this piece, and just how satisfying he makes many of the death scenes (among the most creative you'll ever see), and all previous flaws I found myself meditating upon are easily forgiven. Anything else that may not be up to par, like the amateurish acting, is not even worth mentioning considering how much the film compensates in virtually every other area. Blomkamp sure knows what he is doing.
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