A vehicle from District 9 on display
One of the best opportunities Comic-Con has is to help people form an opinion on upcoming movies and, of course, the people who make them. Today served as an example of what can happen when a revealing, intimate panel makes you feel a previously dormant sense of anticipation for a movie. For me, that movie is District 9. It wasn’t merely the presence of Peter Jackson, though his participation and moviemaking thoughts colored the event in every shade of awesome; the ace 7-minute reel of exclusive footage, coupled with the interaction between director Neill Blomkamp and star Sharlto Copley converted me to a can’t-wait fan of the movie.
If my notes are correct, Blomkamp and Copley have known one another since high school. Their buddy interplay made me realize their chance to work with Jackson is an adolescent dream come true. Jackson was in proud papa mode as he illustrated the joys of working on a lower-budget film (he asserted that big budgets can result in directors playing it safe and creating more for demographics than anyone else); both Jackson and Blomkamp discussed how the collapse of the Halo movie dovetailed into D9‘s birth. (Oh, and to kick off the panel, Jackson said he wished he could bottle “geek power” and deliver it to Hollywood execs.)
After watching the trailer and the aforementioned footage, I had a better sense of the movie’s seemingly impressive blend of narrative, theme, and full-bore action. It’s deadly serious subject matter — the story appears to have a lot to do with how society treats otherness — blended with Jackson’s old-school love of splatter-y gore and his newer-school ultra-refined visual effects.
This seems to be the big final push D9 needs before its August release; coming off a slow, methodical viral marketing campaign, I think the world beyond Comic-Con will be there to embrace the movie in a couple weeks.
Before the D9 crew took the stage, special-effects visionary Scott Stewart showed off material from his directorial debut, Legion. With cast members Paul Bettany, Doug Jones, Adrianne Palicki, and Tyrese Gibson in tow, Stewart screened an exclusive trailer for the audience, who lapped up the hellish look at the angel Gabriel (Bettany) who has come to earth to protect humankind’s single hope against an army of his peers.
I’m intrigued by Stewart’s vision, mainly because he headed up The Orphanage, the now-defunct special effects house whose work is in everything from Sin City to the final cut version of Blade Runner. I believe what co-star Tyrese had to say about Stewart — that he’s saved some of his secret SFX tricks for the movie — but something about this presentation didn’t sit well with me, ultimately. Perhaps it was Stewart’s willingness to dumb the movie down by saying it’s more about angels with guns than it is about religion or faith. Or maybe it was Tyrese’s used-car-salesman approach to selling the movie, as well as Transformers 2 and, by the way, he has a comic book for sale, too.
The look of the work is unique, and I think plenty of fans are now stoked to see how all the elements come together — especially how Doug Jones, mostly out of make-up and playing a liquid-limbed character known as “the Ice Cream Man” fits into the terrifying equation. I was just put off a bit by how eager the filmmaker seemed to be to play down the notion having a narrative with any substance. It didn’t seem like the right thing to say in front of a room full of genre fans and comics aficionados.
