No return for the director of District 9

Neill Blomkamp is a traveling illustration of how fortunes can rise and fall (and fall, and keep falling) in Hollywood. The first feature film from the South African VFX specialist, District 9, was the type of overnight hit we don’t see too much of these days: an original concept genre image (what if we made apartheid to aliens that look like giant shrimp?) returns and a nomination to the Oscar for Best Picture, which propelled an unknown novice filmmaker to the top of the industry’s most wanted list. Bottling this eclair was not an easy endeavor, however, as the somewhat ambitious and undercooked project Elysium put the phrase “sophomore meltdown” in the minds of fans. After that came the regrettable Die Antwoord showcase Chappie. It made the man, or at least his work, a memorable punchline and raised suspicions that his business card triumph could have been fluke in the right place at the right time.

Chappie That was six years ago, a hiatus Blomkamp spent producing experimental shorts and signing up for Extraterrestrial and RoboCop sequelae that fell into the water. In terms of showbiz cachet, it is set back but only one good movie from a potential comeback. It would ideally be his new movie Demonic, a smaller-scale horror project doing more with less relying on its presumed talents as a technician, freed from the flurry of blockbusters that was erasing works. But while Blomkamp has an awesome CGI trick up his sleeve, he totally drops the ball on the narrative end of things. This is enough to make the viewer want the simpler and more immediate pleasures of his filmography, such as being able to point his finger at a screen and say: “It’s Chappie.

Written in 2019 and shot under the constraints of last summer’s lockdown, Blomkamp’s latest shares the flaw of so many COVID-era productions in that it feels slim rather than minimal. Armed with a premise that lends itself to sparse, isolated, and unencumbered spaces with extras, the writer-director fulfills the force majeure conditions as well as his modest budget on their own terms instead of trying to cover them up. But the hellish ordeal experienced by Carly (Suit alum Carly Pope) feels underdeveloped, and Blomkamp’s craft isn’t virtuoso enough to redeem the awkwardness of his script. Our daughter was summoned by a pair of shady scientists (Terry Chen and great actor Michael J. Rogers) to get in touch with her comaed mother (Nathalie Boltt) using an unapproved device that connects their sleeping and unconscious minds. . So pretty much the same chord as Tarsem Singh’s The cell, replacing the serial killer on the loose with an avian demon that follows him as Carly returns to our dimension.

In the other great starting point, Blomkamp portrays mental interiors not as an extravagant fantasy landscape but as real life digitized to resemble a level of The sims. Created using cutting edge technology known as volumetric capture, these passages make Carly and her farm environment like distorted virtual approximations of themselves; patches of skin glisten in nothingness, blades of grass stick together, and the transparency at the back of his head shows the face back from the inside out in an ineffably unsettling effect. Blomkamp’s surreal aesthetic experience nails the texture of a VR setup into its beta testing phase; we remember that the filmmaker went to directing with a series of short films set in the Halo universe, and that a video game influence has been a hallmark of his work ever since. Without convincing the human dialogue to found everything, however, the innovation appears unflattering like a simple gadget.

Aside from the disturbing nature of the simulation, the fears are spared. The weak fear takes too long to transform into total fear, and once the murderous apparition finally appears, it doesn’t make much of an impression. Blomkamp, ​​a student in action, doesn’t have a keen sense of the rhythms of a solid peekaboo horror track, although a possession scene only excels at the contortions of the stand-in performer who moves four. paws. Until the disappointing inertia finale, we can anticipate every move before the movie does.

Here’s a movie in which Carly’s BFF clarifies their relationship by announcing “I’m your BFF! and when conversations end at irregular intervals, whenever a participant decides they “can’t handle this right now”. While Carly’s strained bond with her mother was designed to support the emotional foundation of a brain premise, their decades of pent-up animosity carry no weight in practice. The two interact like occasional angry acquaintances, undermining the “it’s all about trauma” reasoning that has provided so many flimsy storylines with undeserved metaphorical weight in recent times. Blomkamp’s limitations as a storyteller eclipsed his cinematic tower summoner skills for the umpteenth time, leaving us with his most boring and generic work to date. If there’s one takeaway here, it’s that he’d do well to consider directing from a screenplay he didn’t write himself – for stop tempting viewers with so many sequences of sleeping people.