Bridget 1District 9 Viral Marketing Campaign
June 4th 2009 03:36
I'm always holding out for good sci-fi fare, and as you can see below, I found my happiness in the new Abrams Star Trek. But the buck doesn't stop there. I gave it a go with Babylon AD, which in its defense was a perfectly good action movie til the bizarre last few minutes, and Children of Men, recall, was a masterpiece.
So where will District 9 fit in? Between speculation that it is just a HALO viral/testrun itself-- as far as I can tell, not true-- and the intensive marketing campaign it's undergoing, District 9 will either be as intriguing as the "blurred-face" TRAILER makes it look, or it will be the disaster that most sci-fi movies are nowadays.
The viral campaign is oriented around the Multi-National United website, which purports to be a corporate website representing the alien tech-using overseers of the movie's alien slums. The website has all the expected features, though anyone looking for jobs right now can tell you that the careers page is rarely so prominently featured (or maybe we all need to move to the alt-future Joberg?) This campaign brings to mind both the details of the Fido (Billy Connolly, Carrie-Anne Moss) campaign, which also had a corporation website (worth your time: ZomCom, campy 50s zombie production service); and the Dark Knight campaign, where the online campaign bled into the real world, not just with the famous Long Halloween component but also with the newspapers they actually distributed around cities, which included a society page with a headline bemoaning bazzilionare Bruce Wayne's antics.
Do these things help? It's a great way to waste a few minutes online, and each successive addition generates news items in entertainment sources. In the end, it is about the all-vital the hype, and it is the fact that each time the public is reminded about the film, the name gets out there yet again and to more people. Which is what is happening here.
So the movie. (And a further question, what happens when the hype is so undefined that the movie is lost and nobody knows what to expect when it hits theaters-- for example, the speculation that District 9 is just a viral for Halo? Or is the name still enough to suffice until reviews and word-of-mouth starts generating harder, more informational buzz?) Anyway, the plot is that aliens, it seems, landed on earth to repair their ship and were herded into refuge camps in South Africa.
An extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth suddenly find a kindred spirit in a government agent that is exposed to their biotechnology. (imdb.com)
Heavy-handed political message? Maybe. But an intriguing premise none the less; it seems that the closer sci-fi films are to reality (ie, again, Children of Men) the more intense and impressive they are. Even the Batman franchise has realized this by focusing on non-metahuman villains like Joker and Ras; speculation about the next installment is following this guideline, and most of Bats' more extreme rogues gallery has been ruled out. Of course, you could go the complete opposite way with vaguely familiar worlds. . . Ultraviolet.
Sci-fi films are famously disturbing for their near-future settings. Both Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep address to some extent the issue of familiarity in the face of complete alienness. It's the ambivalence of of the uncanny valley; you can't stop staring. I would argue that this is what makes the second wave of trailers, released with the alien's face blurred that much creepier.
Hopefully it won't become an allegorical mess about international refuge camp politics; I'm interested to see if they keep the format used in the trailer, though the plot doesn't sound like it will mesh terribly well with the documentary format. Still, it's exciting to see that the filmmakers are operating in a world is being realized to such a degree that corporation websites can be made to such a stunning extent of realism. We'll find out August 14th.
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