the audience applauded

Sorry, this movie sucks

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

It doesn't happen every day that an aspiring filmmaker is offered the chance to direct a big Hollywood project on the basis of a six-minute science fiction short. And yet that's what happened to South African director Neill Blomkamp, whom Peter Jackson chose for the subsequently abandoned Halo project after viewing a DVD of Alive in Joburg. It's easy to see what caught the Lord of the Rings director's eye: few shorts boast such ambition and originality.Set and filmed in Johannesburg, also known as Joburg locally, the story is that of the population's encounter with an alien race. Naturally, the ETs are viewed as hostile invaders that have to be dealt with quickly and without mercy. Conflict is inevitable.So far, so predictable. What, then, makes Alive in Joburg such an inspired achievement? The fact that most of it doesn't look like sci-fi at all, but rather newsreel footage of something more troubling than an alien invasion: racial conflict. Before the ETs are unveiled, Blomkamp's documentary approach has us believe that the interviewees are referring to human immigrants, not alien ones. Thus science fiction's ability to act as a metaphor is masterfully employed to establish parallels between a fictional close encounter and real-life ethnic struggles, with the unusual setting (for an SF story, that is) heightening the frightening sense of reality.If one has to find a flaw in Blomkamp's gritty, hand-held examination of racism with an otherworldly twist, it would be the fact that the film is - no pun intended - too short, more premise than proper story. However, considering Blomkamp's ambitions must have been justifiably narrow at the time, such a misstep is easily forgivable, even more so with hindsight: with the Halo film shelved, the director was given a chance to expand on his original idea. And so the excellent District 9 was born...

I hunted this short down after watching the trailer for District 9. And you have to hand it to Blonkampp for avoiding a plot-driven mess that this movie could have made. It's interesting to set the film in South Africa as well. The many perceptions throughout Alive in Joburg creates the questions needed to ask about these aliens that are genuinely terrifying in appearance. And the open-ended finale can be finally touched upon 4 years after Blonkampp began this. Does anyone think Blonkampp has the chops to handle Halo if District 9 works out? The short and the trailer would have you think so, but honestly, let's wait for August to continue that debate.

This impressive short takes a documentary form, but it's definitely no Christopher Guest style mockumentary. Instead it's got aliens—really realistic looking ones, with mech-style "bio-suits". Set in an imaginary South Africa where aliens have landed and taken up residence, Alive in Joburg poses as a documentary intent on examining how life has changed for residents there, interchanging interviews with realistic CG. The visuals are excellent and while the film's attempt to equate the aliens reception by locals with South Africa's Apartheid era are somewhat transparent, any attempt at social metaphor earns kudos from me.The director, Neill Blomkamp, is celebrated for his advertising work, and won for himself— based largely on this short I would presume—the directing gig for the new Halo film. I must say, based on this film, it looks like a truly inspired choice.Check out all of our weekly reviews at ShortoftheWeek.com

This is an amazing short-film from a director that is just beginning his career. Neill Blomkamp blends the latest FX techniques with a keen photojournalistic style to bring a sci-fi vision of a South African future. It is the near-future and alien refuges have arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa. The short takes a news documentary approach to tell the story of the aliens struggle to integrate into apartheid like culture. It raises an interesting social commentary on a galactic scale. Neill Blomkamp has been around for a very short time. He has done a few commercial advertising spots and some short films. Perhaps his biggest up and coming film is the tapping by Microsoft to work with Peter Jackson on the film version of the incredible video game "Halo". This project will be well suited to Mr. Blomkamp's style of mixing realistic and sci-fi environments. "Halo" shares a similar theme with Alive In Joburg, they both feature an alien invasion of Africa with a military response.