Rhapsodies

Well I finally saw it. Not all that bad. I don’t think I’ll be going giving it a gold star or anything. While I am glad of a Science fiction that is not just an action film with accessories I need them to do more a film not following formulae.

Anyway as it as been said many a time it’s essentially using aliens in Johannesburg as a metaphor for apartheid and I suppose refugee camps as well. As the film starts with a nearly identical premise to Alien Nation only they take it from the South African Perspective, which means put all of the alien refugees into a camp, that quickly turns into a slum.

They explain away why culture stays mostly unchanged is that one all of the technology that the aliens have only work with their DNA, and two all but two of the Aliens we encounter seem to be a marginally sentient drone caste. Based on this you wonder how the heck they got so much tech (that wasn’t working) down off the ship.

Anyway it does the usual things about corporate greed and man’s inhumanity. It occurs to me that a nice clean professional laboratory in the right context would be far more terrifying than the borderline abattoir they drag the protagonist too once he gets infected by the “prawn” dna.

So anyway for a dramatization to our first exposure to an alien species (technically two species as there are these scorpion creatures that the “Prawns” use in cock fights) It’s pretty well done, and uses the documentary format very well.