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Scriptwriting Classes Ongoing Classes CONGRATULATIONS!RAYMOND OBSTFELD
Devil's Knot IMDB, Mark Sevi.Com ROBERT ROLLINS
VICTOR PHAN PollTo Sell A Script I Would:
Feed Grandma to the zombies.
12%
Put a body part in a vise.
6%
Drink snot and chew aluminum foil.
9%
Wet kiss a cougar (either kind.)
18%
Sell my soul - oh wait, I already did.
55%
Total votes: 33
Apathy kills, but I don't care - Hank Moody Whisky, weed and Warren Zevon, it's the little things -Hank Moody Dr. Leo Spaceman: Now, Jenna. Medically speaking, for your height, your weight puts you in what we call the 'disgusting' range. Fortunately, there are solutions. For example, crystal meth has been shown to be very effective. *holds up brochure* How important is tooth retention to you? Jenna Maroney: It's pretty important... What about my crazy surgical options, Dr. Spaceman? Dr. Leo Spaceman: Please, Dr. Spaceman is my dad. Call me Leo. And there are some wonderful crazy surgical options. Are you familiar with the Bradshaw clinic? Jenna Maroney: Am I? That's where the Olsen twins were separated!
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District 9
LOW BUDGET THE WAY SCI-FI WAS MEANT TO BE
An alien spaceship gets stranded above Johannesburg. Strife reaches a boiling point when the government evicts them from their shantytown. It’s about our fears of the unknown and of each other. How do we react? We place them in detention camps like the Japanese Americans during WWII and give them a derogatory moniker, "prawns." The aliens are humanized to a certain point, never losing their ability for violence or repulsion. The ending is as it should be and makes sense. District 9 was not a mainstream big studio produced film and was made on a shoestring budget of 30 million.
By Clark Jones & Victor Phan
Torture Chamber Productions
Disagree
I think it fails on a couple of levels. Mainly it does it by mixing sub-genres in a way that doesn't really work for either of them.
There's a great big world filled with people that like stories that have a point to them and conversely, there are a lot of people that like special effects and just want to see stuff blowing up.
Act 1 sets up what I see as good classic science fiction; take a premise, change ONE key thing and see how that applies to the current situation in the world. It doesn't have to be "preachy" to do that either. This was done very well in books by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. For example War of the Worlds which is about Victorian imperialism, social fears and racial prejudice. In the 1953 film this gets turned into fears of Soviet invasion. Great stuff really and District 9 had set itself up for a potential discussion along the same lines.
Unfortunately, the end of Act 1 changes everything and devolves into a mess of a shoot-'em-up based of people trying to use something the aliens have to control other things they have that simply don't make sense in that context. If the aliens have and can use these things, they should, by all rights, have much greater power over the people that are trying to oppress them. It would be as if Jews in Auschwitz always had the ability to fight the Nazis and in fact had MORE power than them, but simply choose not to.
It doesn't make sense.
Layer on top of that a search for a mysterious third thing which could solve everyone's problems but is being kept a secret for no reason whatsoever and all you're left with is a special effects movie made for no particular reason that has huge plot holes in it.
Are the special effect great? Yes.
Is it shot and edited well? Yes.
Does the story work? No. Not at all.
I think that pisses off the guys that just want the special effects and stuff blowing up AND pisses off the guys that want a classic science fiction story that makes sense and has a point to it.