All District 9’s Mistakes In One Easy To Digest Video
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Neil Blomkamp’s science fiction action piece Elysium kicks in theater doors tomorrow. Though it has met with a rather tepid critical reaction for heavy-handed political rhetoric—read my review here—it is still definitely worth a watch, especially for genre fans. His previous film, District 9, also his directorial debut, fares somewhat better, but there are still some issues. Now, thanks to the magic of the Internet and people with much more time on their hands than you, you can watch everything wrong with that particular feature film in three minutes (in all honesty, the whole thing runs close to four minutes, gasp).
This video from Cinema Sins features your usual, run of the mill movie mistakes. You know, continuity issues, like the books on a bookshelf have been rearranged from shot to shot, and someone saying the wrong address as the NMU forces are about to raid a particular alien shanty. And of course, because we’re dealing with speculative fiction and unique technology, that always brings of some problematic questions, like if the ship doesn’t have enough power to leave, how can it just hover there for an extended period of time like it does without the batteries running out? Seriously, it just hangs out there for years without budging.
Those are all well and good, but the most fun pieces of this video are the other variety of wrong. In reality, these are more like interesting bits of trivia, anomalies, minutiae, and fun facts, rather than actual errors and mistakes. One instance is the flyer glued to a wall that advertises not only free abortions, but also penis enlargement procedures. If you can’t trust a photocopied flyer on a wall for all of your surgical needs, then I don’t know who you can in this world. There are some gripes about product placement as well, like logo for a particular brand and style of laptop taking up like half of the screen in a couple of shots. But if blatant whoring like that makes you want to not watch a movie, you aren’t going to have a wide selection of films to choose from. It’s a sad fact of life that we’ve had to adapt to.
As good at the rest of the video is, my two favorite bits, however, are when they bring in elements from outside District 9, like the catnip fueled cat literally climbing the walls. That is one wired feline. I’d be afraid that it would learn to cling to the ceiling and drop on my head. And then there is Tommy Lee Jones’ iconic “henhouse/outhouse” speech from The Fugitive dubbed over the footage from Blomkamp’s film. I’m not going to lie, that’s a pretty good time.
