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Friday, May 28, 2010

BD impressions: District 9

6:11 PM / BD Impressions / 8 Comments

Once again, I'm somewhat late to the party. Virtually everyone I know has seen DISTRICT 9, and given what a major talking point it has proven to be, having to patiently explain to people that I hadn't actually seen it (followed by the inevitable "Well, when WILL you?") did get a bit old. In the end, though, the wait was worth it: DISTRICT 9 does have its problems, and I don't think it's quite the revelation that many saw it as, but on the whole it's an excellent piece of work and, for my money, a vastly superior sci-fi/human issues parable than AVATAR, released just four months later.

As some have pointed out, this is very much a film of two halves, with the less than subtle apartheid parallels giving way a more straightforward gun-toting action movie at around the half-way point. I've read some reviews that were critical of this shift, but personally I didn't have a problem with it. Indeed, given that writer/director Neill Blomkamp's rather heavy-handed approach to the allegorical material, the shift to a more direct, straightforwardly entertaining mode of storytelling actually results in a welcome change of pace.

I can't say I was entirely convinced by the alien CGI, which at times has a rather stilted quality, but for the most part it integrates reasonably well with the live action footage, and the use of interview footage and amateur camerawork to creates a mockumentary aesthetic is impressively convincing. The digital photography, meanwhile, may not be exactly pretty, but is certainly appropriate given the aesthetic Blomkamp was going for. A solid piece of work on the whole, if not an out-and-out genre-defining masterpiece.

Image quality: Shot in 4k resolution with the Red One camera, in many ways critiquing DISTRICT 9's image quality seems beside the point, because it's such a mish-mash of deliberately degraded documentary footage and more conventional "pristine" material that it becomes hard to pinpoint where intentional flaws end and unintentional ones begin. For instance, it can look incredibly detailed (see Example 14), but this is inconsistent, and wide shots in particular often have a flat, textureless look. I have no reason to believe that Sony's AVC encode is anything less than a faithful representation of the source material - as with AVATAR, any apparent flaws are either deliberate or the result of the technology itself.

District 9
studio: Sony Pictures; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 22.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 29.09 Mbit/sec

8 Comments

 
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