Neill Blomkamp's Return to Hollywood
Foreword:
This was originally written on Wednesday February 1, 2023. This was originally going to be my second post for this month, but after I saw that trailer for Kyōryū, I just had to write about it and post it on here. I couldn't wait until I posted this because I might've lost what I had to say by focusing in on Neill Blomkamp and his film career. I wanted to say what I had to say about Kyōryū while it was still fresh in my mind. It's the same reason why I like to review movies and TV shows right after I just watched them.
If you're reading this and you have no idea Kyōryū is, basically it's a dinosaur-centric TV and video game project started by this New Zealand-based independent studio 🇳🇿 called Floating Rock Studio. The basic concept of Kyōryū is dinosaurs in Japan 🇯🇵, that's really what it boils down to. That's why it has a Japanese title 🇯🇵, the word "kyōryū" means "dinosaur" in Japanese 🇯🇵. The T. rexes in this project were designed to look like samurais, that's how stereotypically Japanese 🇯🇵 Floating Rock wants this to be. It's a post-apocalyptic story in-which humanity went extinct, leaving behind the dinosaurs they bred through genetic engineering 🧬.
So, this isn't some weird alternate timeline where dinosaurs never went extinct, and evolved further and further until they developed more human-level intelligence and were able to build their own societies as I had initially thought when I started watching the trailer and before I read the description underneath, no. This is much more like Jurassic Park or Carnosaur where they're de-extinct dinosaurs that were brought back using some sort of genetic manipulation 🧬.
Though how the dinosaurs were brought exactly hasn't been disclosed by Floating Rock, and I doubt we'll get very many answers since this takes place sometime in the future after humanity went extinct, and though these dinosaurs are more intelligent than their ancestors from millions of years ago, and have formed their own tribes and societies, they still can't talk. You know, they aren't like the apes in Planet of the Apes where they can talk like humans. Though the apes in the reboot Planet of the Apes movies talk a bit more fragmented and broken than humans do, showing that while they can talk, they can't exactly how humans talk and their speech isn't as eloquent as human speech is.
So, we don't know if the dinosaurs in Kyōryū are clones like in the Jurassic franchise, or if they're genetically modified chickens 🐓🧬 like in the Carnosaur franchise, or at least, the original novel 📖 and the first movie. The origin of the dinosaurs in every Carnosaur movie after the first one is always different, and is never consistent with the first movie or the novel 📖.
In fact, I can hardly call them sequels at all since they are really just standalone movies that have nothing to do with the first movie or the original novel 📖, and would be otherwise unrelated to them had they hadn't slapped the Carnosaur name on it, and if they hadn't used the same puppets and animatronics for the dinosaurs, or just used stock footage. Roger Corman, if nothing else, was a cheap bastard, and didn't care about pesky things like consistency or continuity. As long as it had dinosaurs in it, he was more than happy to slap the Carnosaur name on it, even if it didn't make any sense to do so.
The only movie he didn't do this with was Raptor (2001), which was directed by Jim Wynorski, the same guy who directed Curse of the Komodo, Komodo vs. Cobra, Dinocroc vs. Supergator, The Return of Swamp Thing, and a couple of other movies that Brandon Tenold reviewed on his channel. He's also directed some porn parodies 🔞 of movies, like he made one of Cloverfield called Cleavagefield, he made one of The Blair Witch Project called The Bare Wench Project, and he made one of Paranormal Activity called Para-Knockers Activity, and he's generally known for including nudity and topless women ♀︎ in his movies, especially the ones he made in the 80s. His non-pornographic output in the 90s and the 2000s had way less nudity and boobs than his work in the 80s.
The only movies of Wynorski's that I've seen are Curse of the Komodo and Komodo vs. Cobra, though I watched Komodo vs. Cobra way more often than I have Curse of the Komodo. I used to watch Komodo vs. Cobra all the time as a kid, it was one of my favorites, and even though now as an adult I recognize it's relative poor quality, I still have some nostalgia for it. I even learn while writing this foreword that he even had a hand in Blue Demon, that low budget direct-to-DVD 📀 shark movie 🦈 that I mentioned in my Deep Blue Sea review and said was a rip-off of Deep Blue Sea. He produced that movie, which is crazy to me because it feels nothing like a Wynorski movie.
But, even after Roger Corman stepped away from the Carnosaur "franchise," and after he was it was out of his hands, stock footage from the Carnosaur films was still utilized in another low budget production from my childhood, The Eden Formula. They mostly used stock footage from the first two Carnosaur movies since those were the ones with the best looking T. rex puppet and animatronic, and the new effects they created for the movie look significantly worse than the stock footage from Carnosaur and Carnosaur 2.
Like, it's almost night and day how bad the new effects look to the stock footage. It's crazy that special effects from the 90s somehow managed to look better than special effects in the late 2000s. But, you kind of understand why they used that stock footage besides just the lack of money 💵 and laziness. They knew their own effects weren't very good, so they just used the effects from two other dinosaur movies to make up for it.
But, I'm way off base with this, so I'll swing it back around to what I was talking about. The original Carnosaur novel 📖 and the first Carnosaur movie are the only two entries in the Carnosaur franchise (if you can even call it that) where the dinosaurs were created through genetically modifying chickens 🐓🧬. They also happen to be the respectable entries in the franchise, as they were unique takes on the dinosaur genre, bringing in more body horror elements and making the dinosaurs much creepier and weirder than the ones in say, Jurassic Park.
There is something a bit alien about the dinosaurs in Carnosaur, like there's something a bit creepy and weird about them, and that sets them apart from the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World dinosaurs. It’s not even just that they hatch from chicken eggs 🥚, or even they eat people in pretty gruesome ways, but also some of them burst out of women ♀︎’s wombs and out of their bellies because the villain of the movie, Dr. Tiptree (played by Diane Ladd, the real life mother of the actress who plays Dr. Ellie Sattler in the Jurassic films, Laura Dern) engineered a virus 🦠 that causes women ♀︎ to give birth to dinosaurs.
Like, she figured out a way to bypass the chicken and egg process 🐓🥚, and just have the dinosaurs burst out of infected women ♀︎’s bodies like Chestbursters, but you know, Bellybursters since they’re bursting out of the belly. The reason why Dr. Tiptree did this was that she wanted to wipe out humanity and replace them with dinosaurs, believing that they were more deserving of being the dominant species on planet Earth 🌎 than humans were.
And what better way to ensure there were enough dinosaurs to rule the Earth 🌎 once humanity bit the dust than to have women ♀︎ give birth to them, all 6 billion of them, or however many people were there in the world in 1993, after they were infected? Tiptree wanted to cause a global pandemic 😷 with this dinosaur virus 🦠 of hers, and infect the entire world population with it. She even allowed herself to be infected with the virus 🦠 at the end so that she could give birth to a dinosaur, a Deinonychus to be exact.
It’s funny I use that term because the second AVP movie, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem had Chestbursters that burst out of women ♀︎’s bellies. They were a special type of Chestburster specific to the PredAlien, and what the PredAlien did was directly orally implant Xenomorph embryos into women ♀︎ that it encountered, completely negating the need for an egg and a Facehugger. Once the embryos were inside the host, they would enter the womb, and if there was already a baby growing inside of there, the Bellyburster would eat that baby, which is what happened to the pregnant women 🤰 that the PredAlien impregnated with its own young at the hospital 🏥.
The Aliens growing inside of those women ♀︎ ate their babies instead of their wombs for sustenance, and when they burst out, there was no trace of those women ♀︎’s babies left because those Bellybursters planted there by the PredAlien killed them. That’s what makes Bellybursters 10 times more disturbing than Chestbursters, and why the queen-type PredAlien was presented in AVPR is so much more dangerous and scarier than a regular Xenomorph queen. But, that’s I think of when I think of a parasitic organism bursting out of a women ♀︎’s belly, and to think, Carnosaur did it first.
Everything after Carnosaur 1 was downhill from there. Carnosaur 2 was just Aliens but with dinosaurs, Carnosaur 3: Primal Species was just an even cheaper version of Carnosaur 2 even going as far as to have the same actor play a very similar character as the one he played in Carnosaur 2, Raptor (2001) is whatever, and The Eden Formula is a completely unrelated movie just happens to have Carnosaur stock footage. That's the only reason it gets lumped in with the other Carnosaur movies even though it had no involvement from Roger Corman or any of his production companies whatsoever.
Even though I've never read the novel 📖 of Carnosaur, it does sound fascinating, and does sound like a way better story than any of the other Carnosaur movies combined. It sounds like a nice little piece of dinosaur horror, in a genre lacking in horror. Similar to how people say they should make a faithful adaptation of the original Jurassic Park novel 📖 by Michael Crichton, people have said the same about Carnosaur. Make a more faithful adaptation of the original Carnosaur novel 📖 by John Brosnan on a bigger budget and and way less Corman-y. I would be down for that, but similar to a more faithful adaptation of the Jurassic Park novel 📖, I don't think it'll ever happen, at least any time soon. But, I will say it is more likely to happen than a more faithful adaptation of the Jurassic Park novel 📖, Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park if you will. John Borsnan's Carnosaur.
Back to what I was saying about Kyōryū. It started out as a series, or at least a pitch for a series, but it eventually morphed into a video game after popular demand. People wanted this thing to be a video game more than they did a series, and the people at Floating Rock were more than happy to oblige. The post I wrote about it was all about discussing what it even is, and what the people at Floating Rock are trying to accomplish with it because it was pretty confusing to me, and none of the videos on the official YouTube channel for Kyōryū provided sufficient answers to my queries. You can go read that post if you want.
So, with that Japanese dinosaur game 🇯🇵 made by Kiwis 🇳🇿 out of the way, let's get into this post, the reason why we're here today. Now I initially wrote this back in 2023 after I heard the news that Neill Blomkamp was considering making a sequel to his debut feature film, District 9. And I was basically saying in this that if Neill makes District 10 (the title of the presumed sequel), it would be his big return to Hollywood after making CHAPPiE. Even though the first District 9 was an independent movie made outside of Hollywood, District 10 likely will be a Hollywood film since District 9 was such a huge success, and Sony would want to help Neill make it. He'd be given a much bigger budget than he had on the first movie, and he probably would've up the scale since the ending of the first movie promised something bigger and grander.
I say this in the original text, but District 10 would likely have to be an alien invasion movie since the Prawn character 🦐, Christopher Johnson went back to his home planet to send a rescue mission back to Earth 🌍 to take all of the Prawns 🦐 held in District 10, the concentration camp created to replace the previous camp, District 9, out. And presumably, the other Prawns 🦐 on the homeworld, particularly the leaders, would want to retaliate against the humans for treating their compatriots like that, and would even war against the humans. All the while Christopher tries to reunite with Wikus van de Merwe, and make good on his promise of helping him restore his humanity, even after he's fully transformed into a Prawn 🦐 as the ending of the first movie reveals. The very last shot.
There's just no way you could just make another small scale movie like the first movie, with all of the things that it set up at the end, unless you made it a prequel. But, no body's talking about a prequel, everyone just wants a sequel. They want to a continuation of the story, and they want to see Christopher Johnson return to Earth 🌍, and keep his promise to Wikus to turn him back into a human again if he even still wants to be human again by the time Christopher Johnson returns.
On Neill Blomkamp's end, we really don't know much about his plans or his ideas for the sequel, other than it's going to deal a lot with America 🇺🇸, and be sort of a political commentary on the current political climate of America 🇺🇸. He doesn't want to just focus on South African politics 🇿🇦 in District 10, he wants to deal a lot with American politics 🇺🇸 as well as since he lives in Canada 🇨🇦 and therefore much closer to America 🇺🇸 than to South Africa 🇿🇦 at this point. He has more stake in what happens in America 🇺🇸 than he does in what happens in South Africa 🇿🇦.
He also said that he would only consider making the sequel if the Hollywood movie he actually made after CHAPPiE, Gran Turismo was a success. Gran Turismo did make $122.2 million 💵 at the worldwide box office against its $60 million budget 💵, but I'm not sure if that's enough for it to be considered a success. I also don't know if the critical reception was good enough for it to be a considered a success considering that it received pretty mixed reviews from critics.
This wasn't exactly a movie that lit the world on fire 🔥, as since it's release in 2023, it's pretty much been forgotten about. I'm not even sure if Neill Blomkamp is really all that proud of it since he barely did any interviews for it on the press tour. But you know what? Movies can still be success even with a mixed or poor critical reception, and mixed-to-negative reviews have pretty much become the norm for Blomkamp at this point.
So, I think he might still considering making District 10 after all. Even after all these years, and currently five feature films, District 9 is still his best received film. It's the one film in his entire filmography that has garnered near universal praise, has been held up for award considerations, and is considered a masterpiece. None of the movies he made after have matched the success and admiration that District 9 has received over the years. There's a reason why it's the only film in his filmography that people want a sequel to. The only film that came close to matching the success of District 9 was Elysium, but even then it still received a lot more mixed reviews than District 9 did, it isn't as well remembered as District 9 is, and people have seen it generally consider it to be at the very least a downgrade from District 9.
CHAPPiE negatively impacted Neill Blomkamp's career in Hollywood as despite making a lot of money 💵 at the worldwide box office, it was the most negatively received film of his entire career up until that point. It currently holds a 32% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes 🍅 for whatever that's worth, and it's often regardless as one of Blomkamp's weaker films. The biggest criticism that movie received was the story and the writing, and the decision focus on the two characters played by the members of the real-life South African band 🇿🇦, Die Antwoord, Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi Visser. Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi Visser are their stage names, and their real names are Watkin Tudor Jones and Anri du Toit respectively.
A lot of reviews at the time didn't like that Neill Blomkamp made them the main characters instead of Dev Patel's character, who they considered to be more likable the characters that Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi play in the film. In my fact, I can hardly call them character since they're pretty much playing themselves in this movie, using their same stage names, Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi. They're just a bunch of two-bit gangsters who are in debt to this crime boss named Hippo 🦛, and they steal CHAPPiE from the scientist that Dev Patel plays, Deon Wilson, and they basically manipulate him, pretending to his parents, and use him to try to make enough money 💵 to pay back Hippo 🦛.
All the while, they end up corrupting CHAPPiE's mind and shaping him into a hardened criminal like them, because you know, CHAPPiE has the mind of a child and like all children, he's very impressionable, and needs proper guidance and proper care to mature into an upstanding individual. And as you can imagine, a couple of piece of shit gangsters can't adequately provide that. But, despite how abusive they are, CHAPPiE forms an attachment to both Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi, seeing them as his real parents.
It was a bit frustrating and disheartening to watch, and the worst part is Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi are effectively the main protagonists of the movie. Most of the movie is from their perspective, and it's mostly their story that we're following and are supposed to care about, and we're supposed to sympathize with both of them. When Yolandi dies at the end, it's played off as this emotional movement, like we're supposed to feel sorry for her that she died. But, a lot of people didn't, and that was due to how these characters were written and how they were performed.
A lot of people found both Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi to be very unlikable characters who you both wanted to see die by the end, and while Yolandi does die, she doesn't stay dead for long since CHAPPiE brings her back to life by uploading her consciousness into a robot body. Kind of how he did with Deon, who also got shot and almost died at the end, had it not been for CHAPPiE using his computer programming skills.
Though, while Deon just received the prototype test body inside a hanger of the Tetra Vaal facility, Yolandi receives a custom body that CHAPPiE built for her by hacking into Tetra Vaal's assembly plant. A lot of people also thought the real Ninja and Yolandi were pretty bad actors, as their performances in the movie were highly criticized. People just questioned why Neill Blomkamp decided to cast a couple of rappers with no acting experience whatsoever in the lead roles of his third big sci-fi action blockbuster film.
In all honesty, Neill Blomkamp just cast Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi because he was a huge fan of their work. He really liked their music, and probably wanted to include them in a film project of his, but didn't have the right one until CHAPPiE. In fact, I sort of think now that he wrote CHAPPiE around Ninja 🥷 and Yolandi, which is why he basically just had them play themselves but as gangsters rather than some alternative rap group. It's also probably why he used a lot of their music in the film, including for the end credit, which utilized their song, "Enter the Ninja 🥷," which sampled a song by the Swedish Eurodance pop group 🇸🇪, Smile.dk called "Butterfly 🦋," the song that became a meme a few years back due to its usage in Chinese bootleg toys 🇨🇳.
I was completely unaware of the meme surrounding that song until this year. I just knew of it because I discovered it on YouTube when I was looking at songs from the soundtrack to Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and the soundtrack to Digimon: The Movie. I just thought it was a nice catchy song from the late 90s, from the year I was born in, 1998, and just left it at that. It wasn't until I went back to listen this song again a few months ago that I discovered this meme. Nearly all of the comments on the music video to "Butterfly 🦋" were about the Made in China toys 🇨🇳 that this song was included in, mostly about the toy phones that used this song.
And I knew this had to have been a more recent meme because none of these comments were there before when I watched the music video last. But, it's so odd to me that this song is now associated with cheaply made Chinese toys 🇨🇳, when I myself had no such association. I just associated with it with the Eurodance craze of the late 90s and early 2000s, and with the year 1998 specifically, which is special for me for obvious reasons (I was born in that year).
I also associated with the animated kid's movies of that era like Jimmy Neutron and Digimon, even though as far as I know, this song has never been used in that capacity. It still somewhat disheartens me that the only thing people talk about this song is that it was used in cheaply made Chinese toys 🇨🇳 that made their way to North America, and nothing else. They don't talk about the lyrics and what the song is actually about which is a couple of women ♀︎ (presumably white European women 🇪🇺♀︎ since the song was performed by a couple of white European women 🇪🇺♀︎) traveling to Japan 🇯🇵 so that they can date some samurais, or at least Japanese men 🇯🇵♂︎ who they want to be their protectors like a couple of samurai warriors. Kind of like how men ♂︎ say they want a princess or a queen, well these women ♀︎ want samurais. But hey, at least listening to this song again made me listen to Smile.dk's other music. I can now confidently say that I'm a fan 🙂↕️.
CHAPPiE also probably played a role in hurting Neill Blomkamp's chances of directing Alien 5, or Alien: Xeno as I and many others knew it as at the time. It wasn't just Ridley Scott who tanked that project, and prevented it from getting made, it was also probably the poor reception to CHAPPiE also. Twentieth Century Fox probably lost confidence in Neill Blomkamp after that, starting to doubt whether or not he could deliver a quality product that would please the fans and the critics, and most importantly, make a lot of money 💵. The Disney-Fox acquisition also probably played a hand in tanking that project, meaning that once the deal was finalized, Alien 5's chances of getting made were doomed. But, I'm CHAPPiE did play a significant role in killing the Alien 5 project that Neill Blomkamp poured so much love and passion into. He was also involved in a RoboCop project (or at least he was rumored to be) that went no where either.
The whole experience of working on Alien 5 and maybe RoboCop 4 (whatever that RoboCop project was), as well as the reception to CHAPPiE probably hurt Neill's perception of Hollywood, and is probably why he retreated back to the world of short films after CHAPPiE came out and after Alien 5 fell apart. His work at Oats Studios is the only thing that Neill Blomkamp has had a hand in that has received any amount of praise since District 9. The two shorts that were the best received by far are Firebase 🔥 and Zygote, and those were the ones that Neill Blomkamp had made try to test and see if they could be made into feature films. They never were, and Neill probably considers them to be "failed experiments."
Though, I would like to still see movie made out of those two shorts, particularly Firebase 🔥, the science fiction action horror short set during the Vietnam War 🇻🇳. It's about time we had a different take on the Vietnam War 🇻🇳 than what we've received in the past, and I feel like Firebase 🔥 would've provided that since it wasn't really going to be a war movie at all, but a science fiction movie set during a war. There is a huge difference.
I mean, it would've been about as much of a Vietnam War 🇻🇳 movie as Amnesia: The Bunker was a World War I game. It's set during that war, but isn't really about that war if that makes any sense. Firebase 🔥 wouldn't have really been about the Vietnam War 🇻🇳 or its politics beyond just that it was bad and that America 🇺🇸 was in the wrong for fighting in it. The typical message or take on the Vietnam War 🇻🇳 that we've heard a million times.
The meat of the story would've been about this Vietnamese guy ♂︎ (South Vietnamese I'm pretty sure since the majority of the war was fought on South Vietnamese soil) who somehow gained the ability to manipulate spacetime and bend reality to his will after losing his family in a US raid 🇺🇸 on his village, and used his newfound powers to seek revenge on both sides of the war, and this US Army soldier 🇺🇸 named Sergeant Hines being sent in by the CIA to kill him before he causes anymore death and destruction. As you can see, it's not really a story about the war itself, but is a story that is enhanced by being set during the war. There really aren't any science fiction stories set during the Vietnam War 🇻🇳, so this movie had it been made would've stood out, hopefully in a good way.
A lot of this post is about me correcting myself about which film ultimately marked Neill Blomkamp's return to Hollywood and return to feature films as a whole after focusing in on Oats Studios, and using it as his personal testing ground to see which short would make a good movie. Ultimately, I concluded that Demonic was his return to feature films, while Gran Turismo was his return to Hollywood. Neither of which paid off as well as he probably might've hoped. Demonic was a low budget indie horror film that he wrote, directed, and produced that was received poorly by critics and audiences alike, and Gran Turismo was a mediocre video game adaptation/biopic that, while was technically profitable, wasn't the big sensation that Sony probably hoped that it would. It also received pretty mixed reviews from critics as I said before.
So, I think it's only a matter of time before Neill Blomkamp returns to the world of District 9, his most popular and beloved film. It's just like with Lana Wachowski, and how she returned to the world of The Matrix and made The Matrix Resurrections, after she and her sister, Lily Wachowski spent the majority of their careers making other movies that were received as well and didn't make as much money 💵 as The Matrix.
Even if you want to escape your legacy, even if you don't to be defined by one movie in your career and want to new stuff that people will like (whether they're original or not), eventually, you'll cave and return to the very thing that made you a success in the first place. If Neill does end up making District 10, I just hope that it's good. But then again, I'm not super hard to please, so even if the critics end up hating it, I might still end up liking District 10.
Speaking of things that critics hated, I also briefly mentioned Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 and its prequel, Army of Thieves 🏦 in this post. Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 is a movie that I really liked when I saw it, but everyone else seem to hate. In fact, before Rebel Moon (Part One and Part Two), Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 was probably Zack Snyder's worst reviewed movie. Even more than Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Of course, the Snyder haters, the ones who have always disliked Snyder like the writers of Honest Trailers (who take a jab at Snyder every chance they get), hated it because they don't like anything he makes besides Dawn of the Dead 🧟♂️ (2004) and 300, but even people normally like Snyder's work hated Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰. Army of Thieves 🏦 received better reviews than Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 did, and that was just a regular heist movie that didn't have any zombies 🧟♂️ in it, say for a few news reports showing the outbreak in Las Vegas 🎰 and a dream sequence 💭. BTW, Army of Thieves 🏦 was directed by Matthias Schweighöfer, the actor who plays the character, Ludwig Dieter in both Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 and Army of Thieves 🏦, which is probably why the movie was received better than Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰. It wasn't directed by Zack Snyder, he just co-wrote the story.
Whereas with Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰, he not only directed, co-wrote, and co-produced it, but he also did the cinematography himself, which is kind of sad because the cinematography is one of the main aspects that people criticized about the film. They said that the film was too blurry and out of focus at times. I feel like I'm one of the few people on planet Earth 🌎 that genuinely liked that movie, and defends it to this day. And I don't consider myself to be a Snyder Cultist or anything. In fact, I am of the opinion that Snyder Haters and Snyder Cultists are equally as annoying as each other, which makes sense since they kind of feed off of each other.
I do like his movies, and I think they get a lot more hate, but I'm not so obsessed with him and his work and I don't just blindly praise everything he does, that view him as some of kind of god or something. You know, I'm not one of these people who think he's the greatest director of all time or anything like that. And there are things I don’t like about him, or things I strongly disagree with. Namely how his movies are released. Snyder for having alternate cuts of his movies that are longer than the theatrical ones, and are considered the definitive versions of those movies. He really started doing with Watchmen (2009), and then did it again with Sucker Punch, then he did it again with Batman v. Superman, and did it again with Justice League, and then did again most recently with Rebel Moon, a movie he just straight up split into two parts because of how long it was.
While it was mostly understandable with those other movies I mentioned and I don’t have a problem with it, I mostly have a problem with it with Rebel Moon. Each part of Rebel Moon has an alternate cut that is longer and is more violent than the ones that were initially released on Netflix. Why do I have a problem with it? Because Rebel Moon isn’t a theatrical released movie. It’s not like he had to release these shorter and more watered down PG-13 versions for theaters, it’s a streaming release. So, he could’ve easily have just released the R rated versions of the two parts, and didn’t even have to bother with doing PG-13 versions. It just everything more confused and needlessly drawn out. It could’ve been a lot simpler and more to the point, but I’m not sure how much of this was Snyder’s decision and how much of it was Netflix’s decision.
But, probably the biggest criticism that I have for Zack Snyder and probably the most questionable thing he's ever done is that he was leading his fans on saying that one of his movies going to get re-released. I think it was Batman v. Superman, or it might've been Dawn of the Dead 🧟♂️ (2004), or it might've been his version of Justice League, but whichever movie it was, he was making it seem like it going to be re-released in theaters worldwide or even nationwide.
But then, it turned out it was just a screening at a one day event. He did the same thing again recently with Justice League, saying it was going to be released in theaters, his cut of the movie that his fans campaigned for over the course of 4 years after the disastrous Joss Whedon version was released in theaters. But, the reality was that the movie was just being screened at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles. It had just been bought and refurbished by Netflix, which probably explains why Zack Snyder's Justice League was being screened there.
But, Zack Snyder's Justice League was released on HBO Max (before it became Max), not on Netflix. So, why was it being shown at a Netflix owned theater? It makes sense why Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 was there since that was a Netflix release, but Justice League? No. But yeah, that was a bit scummy for Snyder to do that, to lead his fans on like about his movies being released in theaters. I feel like he should've been a lot more forthcoming and made it clear that these theatrical re-releases were for one-day screening events rather than a nationwide thing in all the major multiplex chains. Rather than being all vague, and allowing the fans to get excited for something that wasn't the reality.
So, I don’t think Snyder is above criticism, in fact I think he deserves criticism when it’s warranted and when it’s fair and not overly vitriolic, which the mistake Snyder Haters always make. They go too far with their criticism of Snyder to where it stops being fair and legitimate criticism and starts being straight hatred. Like, Honest Trailers just straight up has a vendetta against Snyder, like they just have it out for the guy, and their hatred of him is beyond irrational and beyond parody. Their videos on Snyder’s movies are probably some of their worst work. He's just a director who I like and who I root for since it seems like everyone and everything is against him, especially the critics and the entertainment news media.
In fact, I kind of put him in the same boat as Neill Blomkamp, where the odds seem stacked against him, and it feels like there's a bunch of people out there who either want him to fail or just go away, like they just want him to leave the movie business entirely and never make another movie again. Though, I do think Neill Blomkamp is a slightly better filmmaker than Zack Snyder, or at the very least, is more intellectual and has more going on upstairs than Snyder does.
Not to say Snyder's dumb or anything, he is a smart and talent guy, but his movies tend to not to be very intellectual. They prioritize style over substance, whereas Blomkamp's movies, even some of his weaker ones, at least try to go for substance as well as style. District 9 was a perfect mixture of style and substance, Blomkamp and his team balanced it quite well. Elysium, not so much, but it still tried to have substance to back up its style. CHAPPiE is kind of where things kind of start to fall off, and Blomkamp doesn't quite succeed at balancing the style and the substance, as the movie emphasizes style more than it does substance.
Yeah, sure it tries to have some commentary about police brutality, militarized policing, AI and robotics, corporate greed 🤑, gang violence, and of course, parenting, but it doesn't really delve into any of those topics as deeply as District 9 did discrimination, segregation, and xenophobia, or Elysium did wealth disparity, health care, and illegal immigration. It only goes as far as the surface level, and doesn't delve any deeper beyond that, as the movie gets bogged down by trying to be a star vehicle for Die Antwoord, probably one of the worst casting choices I could think of. Like casting Die Antwoord in the movie, and basing the entire movie around them was an ill-advised move from the start. Can't say anything about Demonic or Gran Turismo since I haven't seen either of them. Hopefully District 10, if it happens, will be a return to form for Neill Blomkamp.
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If the District 9 sequel does end up happening, it'll be Neill Blomkamp's first feature film since CHAPPiE, which came out in 2015, which was 8 years ago. This guy has not directed a feature length movie, big budget or low budget, in 8 years 😧! He's been mostly focused on his Oats Studios all this time since then. And this movie probably will have a big budget because it's going to be far more ambitious and bigger than the first movie ever was.
They set the movie up to be grander and more ambitious than the first movie because Christopher Johnson is going to return, and he's likely going to bring an army to rescue the other Prawns 🦐 (now inside District 10) and retaliate against the humans (or at least, MNU and the South African government 🇿🇦) for how they treated his people; meaning it's going to be an alien invasion movie 👽🛸, and those require a lot of money 💵💵💵 to do right. Not only that, but Wikus is still a Prawn 🦐, and the plot will likely involve him finding a way to turn back into his old self, and reunite with his wife, as well as dealing with the repercussions of the events of the first film, and how the aliens (the Prawns 🦐) were treated by humanity.
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Note:
Scratch that, the District 9 sequel won't be the first new feature film that Neill Blomkamp directs since CHAPPiE. It's actually going to be a movie called Gran Turismo, based on a PlayStation video game, or rather, it's a biopic that's about a guy who played the video game. So, it is a video game movie, but not in the traditional sense. It's a video game movie in the same way that The Wizard was a video game movie. That'll be Neill Blomkamp's return to feature film, and District 10 will be his second film after making his comeback.
I mean, he was never really gone, but he was off doing short films, and creating an independent studio for other filmmakers create weird, avant-garde sci-fi horror short films. Yes, I know not all Oats Studios shorts were horror or sci-fi, like Cooking with Bill 👨🍳 was not sci-fi horror, instead it was a satirical black comedy, but the majority of the Oats Studios shorts are sci-fi or horror, or both. Now, he's back doing feature-length movies again 👍.
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Actually, another scratch that, Gran Turismo won't be Neill Blomkamp's return to feature films. He already made his return, in 2021, with the supernatural horror film, Demonic. He made that particular movie during the COVID-19 pandemic 🦠😷, and it was released by IFC Midnight in the US 🇺🇸 and by VVS Films in Canada 🇨🇦. It was given a limited theatrical release before being released on video-on-demand. It received mostly negative reviews from critics upon its release, but just because critics don't like a particular movie doesn't mean that it's bad. Like, I liked Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 and its prequel, Army of Thieves 🏦. I thought they were both really good, even though both of them got dismal reviews from critics, especially Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰.
But, Demonic was Neill Blomkamp's return to feature film after 6 years since making CHAPPiE and having that Alien sequel cancelled on him due to the meddling of Ridley Scott, who was too self-absorbed in his Alien prequel films, and didn't want to let another filmmaker, especially a young one like Blomkamp, to come in and "ruin" it 🙄.
He was jealous that someone younger than him was making an Alien project that people were more hyped than his bullshit prequel movies. It had to be destroyed. But, the way he did it was so shitty, like he pretty much threw Neill Blomkamp under the bus, and tanked his career in Hollywood all because he was making an Alien movie that I know would've been a thousand times better than Covenant. I have never forgiven Ridley Scott for what he did, and I'm sure Neill Blomkamp feels the same way since he turned his back on Hollywood for about 8 years before returning to direct Gran Turismo, a movie that I doubt he considers to be the height of his career. He probably felt betrayed by Ridley Scott after he pretty much stabbed him in the back.
And for what? A film that wasn't even that great and pretty much doubled down on everything people hated about Prometheus, and another film that's pretty much Alien again but with a younger crew? What a waste. Ridley Scott's trash. The thing that pisses me off the most about him is the fact that he's taken ownership of the Alien franchise and acting as if he's the creator. He's not the creator of the Alien franchise, Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett are. Ridley Scott is just a glorified director-for-hire who has been given too much credit and too much power over this franchise that isn't his to own. Like, why does Ridley Scott get to decide which Alien projects get made and which ones do not? It makes no sense to me. He's not the George Lucas of the Alien franchise, he just isn't, and yet he's acting like he is.
So, all we have left of this unmade film is this concept art. Some of these are old from about 9 years ago, from 2015, around the time CHAPPiE was about to come out, while some of these are new concept art that were recently released to the public. If you're in anyway familiar with this project, you'll which ones are the old concept art and which ones are the new concept art that just recently got unveiled. But, regardless of which pieces are new and old, this looks incredible. Had this movie actually gotten made, it would've taken Alien franchise in a truly new direction rather than just variations on the same formula we've seen countless times, which is what Alien: Covenant and Alien: Romulus have effectively severed us.
Although, I haven't seen it, Romulus just sounds like a slightly better version of what Covenant tried to be: a throwback to the very first Alien movie, which is unsurprisingly the one that Ridley Scott directed. Scott just wants to live in the past, and relive the glory days by returning to that same first movie over and over again, and insisting the every Alien movie be exactly like it. But, Alien 5 or Alien: Xeno, whatever it was going to be called, would've truly taken that tired old formula and twisted it on its head. The amount of new concepts here is staggering.
It would've either retconned both Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection, the two movies people say "ruined" the Alien franchise, or at the very least, it would've created its own timeline in-which the events of those two movies never happened, allowing the characters, Newt and Hicks to survive. Oh, what could've been. If this movie got made, I would've definitely gone and seen it, whereas now, I have no interest in watching Alien: Romulus, especially since it's directed by Fede Álvarez, the same guy who directed that Evil Dead remake which I haven't seen and have no interest in ever watching, and it was made with the backing with Ridley Scott. And I refuse to watch anything that has Ridley Scott attached to it, it's why I didn't watch Napoleon. And considering how it was received, particularly by historians, I think dodged a bullet there.)
It's more accurate to say that Gran Turismo will be his return to Hollywood, since it'll be his first Hollywood movie since CHAPPiE. Demonic was an independent movie made entirely outside of Hollywood. And if all goes according to plan, then District 10 will be his second Hollywood movie after making his return to Hollywood with Gran Turismo, and it'll probably be his biggest and most ambitious movie yet with potentially the biggest budget he's ever worked with.
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