Wanderings and … wonderings.

I stayed away from this for years. The title annoyed me in its seeming vagueness. I thought it was either about freejumping or a prison escape, neither of which I find particularly arresting.

Elysium (2013) brought me here. It’s a decent movie that doesn’t really fulfill its initial promise, and Jodie Foster’s dreadful impression of Christine Lagarde is just embarrassing (why did this happen?). But the wildly entertaining histrionics of Sharlto Copley were enough to lure me to District 9. He is mesmerising in it and his transformation into something resembling a human being (by weirdly becoming an alien) is a shocker. But it’s not just the out-of-nowhere star turn, it’s everything. The style – this may be the only time that a found-footage aesthetic works in a film – the action, the boldness with which the picture realises the potential of its premise and runs with it, how a Predator-lookalike alien can be a fully-fledged character.

District Six actually happened. It’s movies, aye, but they say art imitates life.

I should have seen this a decade ago. But I have no regrets. A 5/5 movie.