I will be the first to admit that most (all) of my post title puns are a bit awful. That doesn't mean they're stopping anytime soon, but I do feel that today's is a little misleading for the sake of the pun and that is regrettable. Apart from anything, there are plenty of people in South Africa who would hear you scream, for example if your paraplegic boyfriend is shooting you in the face through a bathroom door. Moreover, I'm not really planning to talk about Neil Blomkamp's mooted upcoming take on the Alien franchise, which hasn't really got much more than concept art going for it, at least as far as I've seen, and by all recent accounts is wishful thinking at best. It just made for a good pun, so I ran with it like a disgraced legless sociopath; awkwardly, but with a steely determination.
It popped into my mind the other day when I saw the Alien Covenant trailer (which looks better than Prometheus, but dowsing myself in deer urine and marching naked into the Alaskan wilderness to be bear fodder is a more appealing prospect than more Prometheus). Blomkamp has done some interesting stuff I think and I would have thought Alien would be aesthetically at least in pretty good hands. It's all the other stuff that concerns me.
District 9 is a great movie. OK, the script is a thinly veiled treatise on apartheid, segregation and discrimination to the point where you wonder if there were even aliens in the original draft. It starts out in a fairly straightforward documentary style but then sort of blissfully abandons it half way through so we can get the tech out and start blowing holes in things. You don't really notice the switch, but it starts and ends as completely different beasts which actually really lends credence to the whole "script with no aliens in it" theory. Two scripts, a roll of gaffer tape later and hey presto! Instant movie. Alright, that's not entirely fair. It worked for From Dusk Til Dawn and it works ok here. Aside from all that I've been gleefully using "fokken Prawn" as a go-to insult since.
Elysium never really hit the same mark, even with Matt Damon (rather than Eminem who legend has it the part was written for) braving dust inhalation and heat exhaustion. Probably says something when shooting inside a factory is effectively a day off. There isn't anything massively wrong with Elysium; it's fairly thick with allegory like District 9 but this time it's a rich/poor divide with the have-nots scrambling over themselves to get to the eponymous orbiting space station so they can get medical care. Problem is that apparently the evil rich people are also inherently stupid and can't work out that if the want to keep the grubby masses off their nice clean porches they just have to send a couple of seemingly commonplace medical pods down to the planet and everyone's happily segregated and free from what ever terrifying degenerative face cancer they've picked up from living in the desert. I can totally sympathise; if I had a porch, I wouldn't want grubby people on it either, getting their greasy fingerprints on everything.
The infuriating thing about Elysium was that for what is ostensibly an action film, the action is really not handled very well at all. You have a dying hero strapped into power armour fighting an actually mental mercenary in another set of power armour (who's already pissed off at Matt Damon for blowing half his face off) so you'd expect some kick ass ass-kickings. Sadly, they never really materialise through all the shaky-cam and blurry close-up shots. It's a real shame, because it could have been spectacular.
Which brings me to Chappie.
Aah Chappie. I wanted to hate it so badly because it just looked plain stupid. That and it was blatantly ripping off the design of Briareos Hecatonchires from Appleseed (feel free to Google that and tell me I'm wrong). I bypassed it at the cinema, but enough people told me good things that I thought I'd take a bit of a gamble on it; weighing everything up, it actually wasn't that bad. Chappie himself is really well done, Sigourney Weaver makes for a good bad guy (or bad lady or whatever. Thanks Tumblr) and Hugh Jackman's mullet/safari shorts combo deserves particular recognition for doing half of his job for him in portraying just how much of a massive dickhead his character is. It's a bit schlocky in places but overall it's fun. There is, however, a bit of a sticking point. Of course there is; we wouldn't be here otherwise.
Die Antwoord.
I'd compare them to Marmite but that doesn't seem fair on your average jar of yeast extract. For those uninitiated in the world of South African pseudo-chavs rapping badly over horrible 90s techno... well that's it really. They had one album worth listening to (which I'll admit to owning) but out of those tracks there were maybe four that were any cop. Die Antwoord fans will probably be wiping the rage-induced spittle from their collective chins right now, rabid bunch that they are, but frankly they're a novelty at best and sort of overstayed their welcome a touch. They were a performance art project before they were a pair of awful haircuts in a haze of hash smoke anyway so I imagine they're fairly likely to pop up at some point claiming it was all a giant installation piece and they're moving to Spain to cultivate a vinyard on the proceeds. I digress.
It was reported way before any sort of trailer that Die Antwoord would be in Chappie so naturally I assumed it would be in some sort of cameo. Apparently not; apparently their acting chops had the sufficient clout deemed necessary for them to carry the whole film as sort of mid level bad guys. It's not uncommon for musicians to take a sideways step into acting, to various degrees of success; Bowie, Sting, Meatloaf, Britney Spears (only time you'll hear all four of those in the same sentence unless Britney goes nuts with a hunting knife after being attacked by hornets whilst eating dinner. Tenous? Me? Never). The thing here is their presence seems to be one giant pre-Deadpool fourth wall break. The soundtrack is comprised almost exclusively of Die Antwoord tracks, which would be fine in a cameo. The characters are named Ninja and Yolandi and at one point there are Die Antwoord t-shirts clearly visible with the band name, band member's faces and names on them. So are we supposed to believe that in the near future music fails to pay off for them (not an unreasonable assumption) so they turn to gun and drug running? On top of that, are the authorities so inept they don't recognise them at all from their bafflingly large fan base and Internet presence?
Elysium never really hit the same mark, even with Matt Damon (rather than Eminem who legend has it the part was written for) braving dust inhalation and heat exhaustion. Probably says something when shooting inside a factory is effectively a day off. There isn't anything massively wrong with Elysium; it's fairly thick with allegory like District 9 but this time it's a rich/poor divide with the have-nots scrambling over themselves to get to the eponymous orbiting space station so they can get medical care. Problem is that apparently the evil rich people are also inherently stupid and can't work out that if the want to keep the grubby masses off their nice clean porches they just have to send a couple of seemingly commonplace medical pods down to the planet and everyone's happily segregated and free from what ever terrifying degenerative face cancer they've picked up from living in the desert. I can totally sympathise; if I had a porch, I wouldn't want grubby people on it either, getting their greasy fingerprints on everything.
The infuriating thing about Elysium was that for what is ostensibly an action film, the action is really not handled very well at all. You have a dying hero strapped into power armour fighting an actually mental mercenary in another set of power armour (who's already pissed off at Matt Damon for blowing half his face off) so you'd expect some kick ass ass-kickings. Sadly, they never really materialise through all the shaky-cam and blurry close-up shots. It's a real shame, because it could have been spectacular.
Which brings me to Chappie.
Aah Chappie. I wanted to hate it so badly because it just looked plain stupid. That and it was blatantly ripping off the design of Briareos Hecatonchires from Appleseed (feel free to Google that and tell me I'm wrong). I bypassed it at the cinema, but enough people told me good things that I thought I'd take a bit of a gamble on it; weighing everything up, it actually wasn't that bad. Chappie himself is really well done, Sigourney Weaver makes for a good bad guy (or bad lady or whatever. Thanks Tumblr) and Hugh Jackman's mullet/safari shorts combo deserves particular recognition for doing half of his job for him in portraying just how much of a massive dickhead his character is. It's a bit schlocky in places but overall it's fun. There is, however, a bit of a sticking point. Of course there is; we wouldn't be here otherwise.
Die Antwoord.
I'd compare them to Marmite but that doesn't seem fair on your average jar of yeast extract. For those uninitiated in the world of South African pseudo-chavs rapping badly over horrible 90s techno... well that's it really. They had one album worth listening to (which I'll admit to owning) but out of those tracks there were maybe four that were any cop. Die Antwoord fans will probably be wiping the rage-induced spittle from their collective chins right now, rabid bunch that they are, but frankly they're a novelty at best and sort of overstayed their welcome a touch. They were a performance art project before they were a pair of awful haircuts in a haze of hash smoke anyway so I imagine they're fairly likely to pop up at some point claiming it was all a giant installation piece and they're moving to Spain to cultivate a vinyard on the proceeds. I digress.
It was reported way before any sort of trailer that Die Antwoord would be in Chappie so naturally I assumed it would be in some sort of cameo. Apparently not; apparently their acting chops had the sufficient clout deemed necessary for them to carry the whole film as sort of mid level bad guys. It's not uncommon for musicians to take a sideways step into acting, to various degrees of success; Bowie, Sting, Meatloaf, Britney Spears (only time you'll hear all four of those in the same sentence unless Britney goes nuts with a hunting knife after being attacked by hornets whilst eating dinner. Tenous? Me? Never). The thing here is their presence seems to be one giant pre-Deadpool fourth wall break. The soundtrack is comprised almost exclusively of Die Antwoord tracks, which would be fine in a cameo. The characters are named Ninja and Yolandi and at one point there are Die Antwoord t-shirts clearly visible with the band name, band member's faces and names on them. So are we supposed to believe that in the near future music fails to pay off for them (not an unreasonable assumption) so they turn to gun and drug running? On top of that, are the authorities so inept they don't recognise them at all from their bafflingly large fan base and Internet presence?
"Hey Sarge, I think I just saw Die Antwoord robbing an armoured car. Shall I call their record company for their home addresses?"
"Who?"
Maybe it's less unbelievable than I thought. Even so, the whole thing is just weirdly out of place. It's so easily avoided as well; just change the character names. Change their look. Cast someone else if you're so desperate to have their tracks in your movie. Judging from some of the rumours flying around about how impossible they were to work with (particularly Ninja who is allegedly quite the sex pest) I can only assume it all came down to ego. We are talking about a guy who threatened to sue DC because Jared Leto's [awful] Joker had tattoos, so he naturally assumed it was based on him. Yeah.
All that being said, I'm quite looking forward to Ripley chasing Sharlto Copley's Mo-Capped Xenomorph around Cape Town.
"Get away from her you fokken prawn!"
Instant classic.
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