21 year-old Sean Wilson, from Torquay, Englany graduated from the University of the West of England in Bristol with a 2:1 in Film Studies and English. Sean also loves music, especially film music from composers such as John Williams and Thomas Newman. With his love of film, reading and writing, Sean reviews films for the Fujairah Observer!

Sometimes, aborted movies can bear surprising fruit. Take director Neil Blomkamp's new sci-fi thriller District 9, a terrific piece of entertainment that likely would never have got off the ground had his intended project, an adaptation of the videogame Halo, taken shape. Instead, producer Peter Jackson handed him a $30 million meal ticket to make whatever project he wanted. Blomkamp decided to enlarge his striking short film Alive in Joburg, a mockumentary about the tensions between Johannesburg-slum based aliens and humans. It's not exactly subtle but it's a witty, edgy concept, a nifty allegory that, with more money pumped into its feature length twin, becomes that intelligent yet slightly tongue in cheek blockbuster the summer has been crying out for. After some preliminary mocko footage, re-establishing the set-up of Alive..., we are introduced to ineffectual Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, excellent), desk jockey with corporation Multi National United. Wikus' task, as recorded by the film crew, is to round up and serve eviction notices to the million or so 'Prawns' living in the District 9 slum. Already it is clear that Blomkamp is having tremendous fun painting his ideas on a larger scale, with Wikus acting as a crucial point of focus for the audience and much subversive humour being mined out of the interstellar language barriers between the aliens and their oppressors. Dare one say... apartheid? True it's as understated as a brick through a window but Blomkamp's straight faced (and semi-autobiographical) playing of events helps steer the film through murkier waters when it carefully dispenses with the doco format and mutates into a more generic sci-fi thriller. Heck, it's terrific to finally again have a sci-fi movie with a humane message. Soon Wikus has been exposed to a particularly nasty brand of ET-Flu, engineered by hero Prawn Christopher who requires the substance for his own ends. With Wikus rapidly transforming into a human-alien hybrid (cue some David Cronenberg body horror - Blomkamp wears his influences gleefully), he is hunted by his former employers, and must return to District 9 to form an uneasy alliance that may save his life... What the director does so brilliantly is take the story in new directions without ever misleading the audience. After all the concept is inherently daft...but the documentary framework very cleverly lends it a sense of being realistic, so it’s a smooth progression when the political message is used to power the more conventional good vs. evil conflict between Wikus and his corporate adversaries. And that message is never lost sight of, be it the chief antagonist labeling the increasingly alien Wikus a 'half breed' or the sinister exploitation of the Prawns by the black magic practicing human inhabitants of District 9. If it does threaten to evolve into Transformers, fear not: this has too much of a brain...and, in its closing stages, real heart too.

Pacing is an issue in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the first of a two part bio-epic detailing the rise and fall of Jacques Mesrine, France's most notorious criminal. Before you can say 'sacre bleur', Mesrine has had two wives, emerged as a violent underworld player, and been imprisoned in two countries...and that's just the entree. What Martin Scorsese managed so well in his 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas was to convey the wider picture of minor mob hierarchy, ranging from the teenage years of prospective gangster Henry Hill to his sell-out days as a mob informant. Everything had coherence, every moment added up to a violent, fascinating tapestry of life on the edge. Killer Instinct by contrast feels bitty and lacks substance. What it does boast however is possibly Eurostar Vincent Cassell's breakout performance. Cassell, who has worked consistently hard since his breakout role in La Haine (which Killer Instinct superficially resembles) is a force of nature as the title character, always skirting on the edge between anti-hero and reprehensible thug. We begin in situ in a harrowing Algiers-set opening sequence, where Mesrine is enlisted as a soldier during France's colonial occupation. Forced to execute a suspected traitor at point blank range, this is cleverly structured as the genesis of Mesrine's uncompromising criminal character, framing the brutal activities to come. On the return to Paris, his next step is to reject his bourgeois parents' platitudes of a 'normal life' and he soon falls in with a murky crowd, making an impression on local kingpin, Guido (a menacing Gerard Depardieu). Imagine all of the above crammed into a mere 15 minutes and you have an impression of Killer Instinct's breathless pace. With such a fascinating life to cover, director Jean-Francois Richet has created a rod for his own back in attempting to cram his film with incident rather than insight. There's such a rush to portray Mesrine's rise to fame (in preparation for the second installment), that the story loses credibility, although certain vignettes crackle with slow burning tension (Mesrine and Guido's nighttime disposal of a pimp builds suspense to nail-biting proportions all through carefully timed glances). It's a pity that such depth only occasionally breaks forth; indeed, the film's subtle indictment of France's colonial policy, as witnessed in the opening scene and later on, lends it the edge it so desperately needs. Thankfully events are better staged in the latter half when Mesrine conducts a pulse pounding Canadian prison break before recklessly returning to take the guards on himself. Here, finally, the film is content to let the anti-hero's psyche speak for itself, to let the implications of violence and criminality sink in through extended, leisurely set-ups rather than chopping and changing throughout the decades. The climactic callous act of violence may in fact tell us we have underestimated the troubling character we have just spent two hours with...complexities that can only deepen in the in the second installment.