My husband and I occasionally watch a rated R movie. We've seen Charlie Bartlet, V For Vendetta, The Kingdom of Heaven and Troy. Nik has seen more than I have because he grew up in a country that had very few people who shared his beliefs. All of the movies I mentioned above left me feeling uplifted, as if I had grown and become a better person by watching them. I figured that if I was careful and read the summary and watched the preview of a movie I would be able to tell whether or not I could watch the movie, despite what it was rated.
This stopped me from going to see Watchmen, because of the unnecessary scenes. My husband went to see it and admitted to me that there were quite a few unnecessary parts within the show. It made me feel good to know that I had made the correct decision. However, you can't always judge a movie by what the preview looks like and what the summary says about it.
Yesterday was Nik's last day with me before he went to Arizona for five months. He really wanted to go see the movie that just came out called District 9. I had watched the preview and read up on the movie a bit, and decided it looked a bit like an action movie, so even though I had a slightly bad feeling about the show, I told Nik I would go. We bought tickets to the nine thirty-five show in the evening.
When the show started, I was excited. After all, Peter Jackson was part of the production crew, so how could it be a bad show? It started out as a documentary, and anyone who knows that I made a documentary would know that I would appreciate the art within a show that started out as a documentary. The documentary explained about how the aliens came over Johannesburg and their ship was broken so the Johannesburg government created district 9 to house the aliens. This then became a slum and aliens (called prawns) were forced to stay in there because the humans would not tolerate integration of species.
The whole thing was very intriguing. The gist of the documentary was about how district 9 was going to be cleared and about the people who were going to clear it. MNU was the company clearing it; they are the second highest weapons manufacturers in the world in this show. Everyone knows that the main reason MNU is there is to confiscate alien weaponry and try to make it so humans could use them (the weapons were biologically tailored to prawns, so no human could fire them because they do not contain prawn DNA).
Up to this point in time there was no swearing, the show was intriguing, and I was interested, so I stayed in the theater. Oh, and as the story would go, things just went downhill. MNU goes to clear district 9. The F word was flying, and things were getting edgy. A bunch of weapons were confiscated, and then the head of the operation finds a cylinder that ejects black liquid onto his face and hands. (Previously, you see prawns manufacturing this weapon and talking about how the humans mustn't find it.) At this point everyone in the theater knows that this man is going to start turning into a prawn. He gets beaten up by a prawn and the men say he should be taken to the hospital. The emergency doctors just wrap up his bleeding hand and put his arm in a sling.
He gets sicker as the day goes on, and he is taken to a hospital (all this time things are just getting bloodier and bloodier and the swearing worse and worse). When they take off the bandage his hand has turned into a prawn hand. When I saw this I almost threw up. I wanted to leave, but I wanted Nik to get to watch the movie he wanted, so I stayed and managed to calm my stomach down.
Scientists come and take the man and start performing weapons experiments with him, all of the time with the man trying to refuse. The scientists torture him and make him kill things and it just keeps getting bloodier and bloodier and my stomach is churning. At this point I have a headache. I got up and left just after the scientists decided that they needed to take everything they could from this man because his DNA was exactly even between prawn and human. The man's father-in-law was the one that gave the okay to do it. They didn't give the man anesthetic and started with his heart first. When I heard that I looked at Nik and told him I needed to leave. He got me out of there with my back turned, but I could still hear the screams from the man as they were taking his heart. Supposedly that was only just over halfway of the movie.
When we got out I started crying and then stopped because I needed to puke. I couldn't get myself to puke in the movie theater, though, so we left. I felt terrible for the next hour and a half after we left. There was nothing in that movie that will ever get me to watch through that again. I had been totally deceived by the preview and the summary I had read. The movie was ten times worse than I could have ever imagined it would be. I learned my lesson last night: Don't go to rated R movies.
