Fooking prawns throwing fookin' lollipops right in my fookin' eye!

It's the best sci-movie in quite a while (although we haven't seen 'Moon' yet), especially since it's one that achieves a balance between the action and compelling drama in a way I haven't seen since Children of Men - which for me is high praise indeed. Blomkamp has made a stunning debut with a unique vision - at times his style reminded me of Verhoeven (a few Robocop moments with the mecha, along with mostly brilliant effects work and nice Red HD pics) or Cronenberg (as our stupid but beloved hero Wikus experiences a few changes over the course of the movie) in it's themes, and with the broad humour and abject body horror of Jackson's early work.

But these are just names I'll be dropping to friends to encourage them to go to this movie, Blomkamp presents his audience with a story dense in intelligent science fiction concepts which are often just implied rather than explicitly shown, and lots of references to gaming science fiction (the guns and the mecha especially) as well as other literature and movies. But it seems like a new story, and an innovative style, and it's also really open; both to conclusions and interpretation. I've been talking it over with people who have seen it all day.

I have some qualms, but they are minor; the whole film has a slightly clunky structure - starting as it does in mock-documentary mode the film eventually abandons this technique with no real explanation. It's a minor beef, however, as the film's engaging lead and his arc in the overall story carry us through this (Silly Wickus and his daft wife have an abiding affection for each other that nearly had me losing it at the end of the movie), but it could also have been smoothed over more convincingly with one scene of exposition, Cloverfield-style. The other aspect is the Prawns themselves; I can accept that they are worker bees, but they are worker bees with freaking gravity guns and hard core weaponry - there should at perhaps have been a little more collateral damage and fracas when they first arrived. But then again, my interpretation is that they are refugees on a ship literally exhausted when it docks at Planet Earth at the beginning *Spoiler* (at least until Christopher eventually 'wakes up' and can accumulate enough of the virus/nanotech to restore it).