I’m a little behind in watching the $10 movies – why spend $10 at a franchise theater when I can wait 2 months, pay $3 to watch it at Laurelhurst Theater and drink beer? Or wait for the DVD and browse the incredible selection of horror and science fiction at the famous Movie Madness?

Anyway, I saw both Surrogates and District 9 recently and I guess I had very different reactions than most movie reviewers. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, District 9 received a 90% while Surrogates is sitting well below the fresh pick list at 39%. Surrogates doesn’t actually receive too many awful reviews, a lot of people say that there are some good ideas, that it fits nicely into the genre of warning-movies, but that it does a lot of things that have been done before too. District 9 has been applauded as very original, relevant and timely, and a movie that doesn’t require top-tier celebrities to be good. It is possible that my opinion of these movies boils down to perception. I was informed that D9 was one of the best science fiction movies of recent and that it was a low budget movie and I was told that Surrogates was no good. For Surrogates I wasn’t expecting much, and for D9 I was expecting too much. So, what do I think, what would my review of Surrogates and D9 look like?

District 9, is undeniably a creative movie with a story that has not been overplayed and that links its conceptual framework to humanities inability to treat everyone as human. I think many people have forgotten the movie and television series Alien Nation, which starts with a large alien ship not to dissimilar from the D9 ship, finding free parking in the desert, being granted permission to stay by humanity, and then the aliens try to integrate themselves into society. In Alien Nation, they look enough like humans, but they are not easily accepted, and are often blamed for bad neighborhoods and violence. D9 doesn’t sound too different does it? But after the first 30 minutes D9 turns away from dealing with the societal issues arising with the new aliens and turns instead to a story that seems more of a chase/thriller than a didactic and worldview-changing film.

What made the first bit of the movie so interesting is sacrificed for hollow special effects. The main character is working for the government to capitalize off the alien race and while doing his job is infected with an alien virus that slowly turns him into an alien. In this moment we are supposed to feel attached to him as a human, and be appalled by the inhumanity of those that once employed him, and maybe even feel compassion for the alien race that adopts him. The problem is that the aliens are so slickly animated that they lose any sort of real credibility; they don’t feel real the way Gollum felt real. And I am never saddened by his transformation the way I was saddened by Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. What was needed in this movie was a moment where you realize that even in his transformation, things would be okay, the aliens are not as bad as you thought they were, that it’s not a big deal – but this moment never came because they were never believable in the first place. I would recommend my readers watch Creation of the Humanoids, a movie from 1962 that quite nicely addresses these same issues of inhumane treatment of humans. Lastly I wanted to say that I’ve never seen anything else that Niel Blomkamp has made, but it seems that some of his shorter movies were direct inspirations for D9, and were maybe even incorporated into the movie (can anyone verify this?). These are the parts at the beginning that show people on television reports saying that they want the aliens to leave. These, along with the next 15 minutes of the movie, were the best parts of the movie – they seemed the most thought through and the rest of it felt rushed and thin, relying on the visual effects more than it should. I’m wondering if when Peter Jackson got behind the movie it was pushed in directions Blomkamp would not have chosen. I’m not sure what happened, but I’d be interested in finding out. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, I thought it had a lot going for it, but I’m trying to say a few things that I don’t hear too many other people saying about it.

Surrogates never promised to be anything but a slick movie, I mean it’s got Bruce Willis in it for crying out loud. You have to take it for what it is. For me, it might sit well with movies like Soylent Green and Logan’s Run which were slick for their day, relying on celebrity, adding cliché and cheesiness. When you are able to agree to that, Surrogates is much more pleasant than if you were to have the typical “Hollywood Bashing” attitude. A lot of movies over the past few years have suggested that we are just robots feeding the system, and that we need to break free and rediscover our humanity. I’m thinking of Wall-E, The Matrix, there’s a few zombie flicks you can throw in there too. Stepford Wives is another movie where people are replaced by an other-robot for the pleasure of whoever’s paying for that bill. I very much appreciated that Surrogates used it’s slickness to its advantage the way that a Spielberg film would do the same – like Minority Report. It did not, however, rely on the boring farcical treatment that most people mistake as humor in movies such as Idiocracy or the 2004 Stepford Wives. Mostly though I think that Surrogates has more relevance than people give it credit for. How often do we hide behind our internet identities, how often do we try to live vicariously through other people, how often do we allow our dreams to fade away while we sit by and let our employers feed off of us, how often do we not go do anything with anyone because we become tired or afraid of meeting new people, how often do we let ourselves live in the past. Maybe I’m just partial to these questions and that’s why I liked Surrogates more. I do think though, that Surrogates had a didactic element that it maintained for the whole movie, much like the original The Day The Earth Stood Still. This element did not get lost in the story, or with the slick effects.