LogFAQs > #938878856

I liked it overall but I admittedly have a serious soft spot for first contact stories. I felt like the aliens had a distinctive design that allowed them to be pretty expressive, liked the gore, liked the Body Horror angle, liked the action scenes, liked the whole documentary feel, and I found enough to like about this movie overall. On a scale of 1-10 I'd give it a 7, slightly closer to an 8. My two biggest gripes were the film not really breaking any new ground in the plot it was trying to tell and not really developing any of its ideas that well. Even Black Panther had a more fully-realized message IMO, and 2009 must not have been that great of a year for film if this got nominated for Best Picture. That being said, there were two aspects of the film that really stuck with me:

-The way this movie handles the whole aspect of the hero Going Native felt like a neat contrast from Avatar (released later the same year), almost like it could be read as an answer to the latter film's Mighty Whitey undertones. In the latter film Jake takes the form of one of the aliens to befriend them, whereas Wikus is a racist idiot who is forced to befriend the aliens because he's a wanted fugitive and is turning into one of them. Could also be read as an answer to similar plots like Dances with Wolves or The Last Samurai.

-I liked the use of HANDHELD cam during the action scenes, as it lent a chaotic feel to them that suited the plot very well and captured the tension the characters were feeling at those moments. Handheld cam is not the same thing as the infamous shaky cam, since there the camera moves as if it's being carried by hand rather than just jerking back and forth.

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