A REAL SF movie!

[caliban]

We just saw "Sleep Dealers." It's an sfnal movie--a REAL SF movie about ideas, not just blowing things up (although, if you need it, things do get blown up)--set mostly inTijuana. Most of it is in Spanish with subtitles. We thought it quite good, a kind of "Neuromancer" meets "Enrique's Journey." Nice to see an sf film about third-world issues without Kevin Costner et al coming in to save the brown-skinned folks. It's not the best film we've ever seen, and if you read widely in sf you'll have encountered many of these ideas already (it's the kind of topic *I* would write about) but as a movie it was refreshing--just seemed true to SF in a way I haven't seen in a long while.

[Windwalker]

I checked the writeup at Rotten Tomatoes. Sounds intriguing! It hasn't opened in my part of the woods (which is unusual). But Moon just started showing. Have you seen that? If yes, opinion?

[caliban]

Sorry, haven't seen Moon yet.

[Windwalker]

We just saw District 9. I can't believe the Tomatometer stands at 88%! The film is awful, but not because of the aliens.

Think of Alien Nation meeting (or is it fusing?) with The Fly by way of Alien and Aliens, add a splash of Cry, The Beloved Country and Black Hawk Down, not forgetting, of course, Kafka's Metamorphosis... and you have an idea of what a jumble of recycled clichés this film is. Not a single original concept. After an interesting beginning it abandons all pretense of coherent plotting and becomes an unrelenting splatterfest. This is neither SF nor social commentary; it's violence porn.

The CGI effects were excellent, the documentary style of the beginning intriguing, and the A/C was on full throttle. That's all I can think of that was good.