For a movie with no stars and no built-in audience, Neill Blomkatt’s District 9 is buzzing incredibly well. Sure, the Peter Jackson connection may have something to do with the interest and excitement, but I’d bet a lot of the traffic and talk being devoted to the film today is more due to how awesome it looks. And how well it’s being marketed, of course. But with the latest trailer, which arrived online yesterday, heating up the exposure and anticipation so immensely so quickly, could there be room for overkill? I actually don’t think so. This won’t be another disappointment a la Snakes on a Plane or Cloverfield, because it’s a more interesting premise, not just some cheap genre pic with heavy viral promotion.

Maybe I’m just allowing my expectations to get higher than usual, but I’m truly optimistic that this will actually be good. It’s dangerous territory for me to be getting in, and the film and its campaign are probably going to blow up in my face like that “can” of toxic material in the trailer. Oh well, what else do I have to look forward to next month? G.I. Joe? Inglourious Basterds? I gave up on my excitement for both of those long ago, and I want to be surprised by something out of nowhere. Unfortunately, modern movie distribution doesn’t allow for such complete surprises anymore, so this may be the closest thing I’ve got.

Let’s see what kind of buzz or buzzkill the blogs are inciting after the jump:

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects is super excited that this looks better than Neill Blomkamp’s first film:
  

  As trailers go, this is one of the best I’ve seen this year. Perhaps even better than that final theatrical trailer for Star Trek, with its ability to show off just enough action to get the blood flowing and just enough story so that we know what is going on. The effects we are seeing here are leaps and bounds better than what we saw in Neill Blomkamp’s short film upon which this is based, and that’s saying something as those effects were damn good. I don’t mean to get hyperbolic here — but this could very well be the most surprising, electrifying film of the remainder of 2009. Take that, James Cameron.

• Marc Bernardin at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch is ready to skip over this film and go right to director Neill Blomkamp’s obvious next project:
  

  Once upon a time, Peter Jackson was hired by Universal and Fox to oversee Halo, the film version of Microsoft’s killer military/sci-fi videogame…The man he wanted to direct Halo was Neill Blomkamp, who had nary a feature credit to his name but had shot a stunning short called Alive in Joburg, about aliens living a segregated life in South Africa. Halo eventually fell apart: the stated reason was that the budget had spiraled out of control, but underneath that was the fact that no one wanted to spend ungodly sums of money on a Halo movie that Jackson himself didn’t direct. No one wanted to be in the Neill Blomkamp business. Something tells me that District 9 might change some minds.

• Guy Lodge at In Contention is beginning to lose interest:
  

  Can’t say I’m as sold on the venture as others are — and the new trailer makes it look rather broader and less enigmatic than what we were originally led to expect — but I’m always up for seeing my hometown of Johannesburg show its sun-bleached colors on screen. Represent, Joeys.

• Vince Mancini at Film Drunk smells racism on the director’s breath:
  

  Anyway, the humans fear the aliens, so they marginalize them from society and control their movements, and the aliens’ frustrations eventually makes them violent, which only proves to the humans they were right to stick them in ghettoes all along. Anyone else smell a parable for Palestinians, or some other ethnic minority group?  Then again, the director’s South African, so it might just be an allegory for how much he hates black people.  They can get away with that in South Africa.  Why?  Diplomatic immunity.

• Swarez at Twitch is only critical because he’s jealous:
  

  I hate Neill Blomkamp. Hate him. Why you ask?
  Because the talented bastard is only 30 years old, four years younger than me and he’s probably gone and made the best sci-fi film this year.

• Rob Bricken at Topless Robot once again compares this film to its biggest August competitor:
  

  It would be downright asinine of me to use the word “good” to describe both the G.I. Joe trailer with the new trailer for the sci-fi flick District 9, which I think we can all agree looks definitively “good.”  It also appears to be science fiction, have aliens, action scenes but also a coherent plot that makes sense within its sci-fi world. Wacky!

• Brian Prisco at Pajiba believes it can’t be much worse than G.I. Joe, but he’s wary and critical at this juncture:
  

  I thought it’d be a lot more low tech than it is: there are glimmerings of Independence Day with the action sequences in the new trailer. I had been hoping for a little Alien Nation action — James Caan and Mandy Patinkin with super shotguns and hyperviolence. It’s rated R for bloody violence, which should give us all hope. The fat lady might sing, but that bitch is gonna be covered in a bucket of blood when she do. It seems like it’s got a pretty sinister sense of humor, but I’m not holding my breath. The aliens look like a combination of cockroaches and toasters.

• Rob Keyes at ScreenRant has no problem with an ID4 comparison:
  

  We even finally get to see what all those viral ads look like in the actual movie. I love this trailer and to me, it feels like a hyper-real documentary of what Independence Day would of looked like in a more realistic situation (minus the whole global destruction upon first contact thing).

  I’ve been looking forward to seeing this ever since the project began and now my excitement seems more justified than ever. I’ll be there opening day for sure.

• John at The Movie Blog shares an email he received from a reader that apparently proves this movie is only tracking so well because of Peter Jackson’s name. From that email:
  

  I decided to do a little experiment. I used my Vegas editing program to take the District 9 trailer and just edited out Neill Blomkamp’s and Peter Jackson’s names and inserted Michael Bay’s name. When I got to work I showed a couple of people the version with Jackson’s name and then some other people the version with Bay’s name. The results were sad.

  Every single person I showed the trailer to with Jackson and Blomkamp’s name on it (I explained who they both were) loved it and thought it was awesome. When I showed the exact same trailer with Bay’s name on it instead, people said it looked awful. The only change I made was the name on it. Nothing else.

• Ben Child at Guardian Film Blog also thinks this film is actually being marketed as something akin to Michael Bay’s latest, but hopes it might really be a throwback to pre-blockbuster sci-fi:
  

  What’s a little confusing is that the creatures appear to be organic organisms in some scenes, and metallic mechanoids in others, leading some to speculate that Blomkamp has tried to inject a man v machine element into the mix, in an apparent bid to tap into the Transformers/Terminator market…District 9 will also live or die according to how well it satirises apartheid: overdo it, and Blomkamp and co risk appearing exploitative, but hit it dead on and this could be a late-era addition to the canon of classic Soylent Green-esque sociological sci-fi, the sort of thing that became a rarity after George Lucas introduced the world to space opera with 1977’s Star Wars.

• Owen Williams at Empire points out that this is just a latecomer in a summer ‘09 trend:
  

  We knew about the documentary approach from the teaser trailer (also up at Yahoo) but the full clip gives a pretty good idea of the scale of the action too, with a lot of quick shots of firefights between ground troops and what look like giant mechanoids. Which makes for the third humanity-versus-robots rumble this summer, after Terminator: Salvation and Transformers: ROFL (sorry, ROTF).

• Daniel Dumas at Underwire sees the opposite:
  

  The film’s smart concept of alien refugees stranded in South Africa and forced to endure apartheid-like treatment seems like the perfect antidote to summertime CGI circle-jerks like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

• Mark Graham at Vulture also sees the opposite, but the placement in Cloverfield company isn’t too gracious:
  

  We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: District 9 is well positioned to be this year’s Cloverfield. The similarities between the two films are striking in that both feature a riveting sci-fi-leaning plot, a cast of no-name actors, and some impressive yet understated special effects (read: the exact opposite of anything you saw in Transformers: RotF).

• Wookie Johnson at Screen Junkies offers some other comparisons:
  

  It’s like they put Signs, Iron Man, and Slumdog Millionaire into a blender but instead of setting to “Blend” they went straight to “Purée Your Balls Awesome.” And now my balls are but a frothy soup. So much for having children, I guess. Is it wrong that I’m totally okay with this?

Here’s the trailer, courtesy of Yahoo!: