Monday, May 18, 2009

District 9 - Online peek at Jackson's sci-fi movie | Stuff.co.nz

A replica Lancaster bomber destined for the film Dambusters is not the only tantalising peek that Peter Jackson has revealed of his projects.

A trailer for Jackson's first big budget science-fiction movie, District 9, filmed in South Africa, is now online.

It features gigantic saucer-like spaceships hovering over Johannesburg and insect-like aliens being interrogated by human officials.

The film is produced by Jackson and co-written and directed by South African Neill Blomkamp, who was to have directed Jackson's mothballed Halo sci-fi movie in Wellington.

District 9 will be released in the United States in August and New Zealand in October. The film has a gritty documentary-style look, similar to Blomkamp's short film Alive in Joburg, which can also be seen online.

Jackson told Rolling Stone magazine District 9 was about aliens arriving 20 years ago in a dead, derelict mothership, which hovers above Johannesburg.

"It's enormous, like the size of 10 football fields. The aliens have ended up in a Soweto-style township beneath the ship.

"It's clear that they're not really integrating into society. They like to scavenge things, rip up train tracks. So the authorities shift them 200 miles away, into the African veldt. They've built a concentration camp. The residents of Joburg want them gone."

Some of the visual effects for the film were done by Wellington's Weta Digital.

"[But] the aliens are so mundane and so part of the geography that you don't really focus on them at all," Jackson said.

"The film has a documentary rawness to it. It's original, which is good because the film industry today only wants to remake every 70s TV show and superhero graphic novel."

* Watch the trailer here.

via Online peek at Jackson's sci-fi movie | Stuff.co.nz.

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