There are a couple of strokes of genius in District 9 that renew one’s hopes for the future of genre film.

One is casting Sharlto Copley, who’s not a trained actor, as protagonist Wikus van der Merwe, a dweeby South African bureaucrat who has greatness thrust upon him and doesn’t know what to do with it. Copley plays him so unheroically that he could head the cast of a South African version of The Office right now, no questions asked.

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I seriously thought my eardrums had burst a couple of times during Terminator Salvation. The movie sounds like jets crashing into a junkyard, one after another, with intervals of loud pompous narration delivered via public address system between the screeching collisions. The movie looks like that same junkyard in the immediate aftermath, twisted smoking metal and grit everywhere. But I’m making it seem kind of good, and I don’t mean to. It’s not good. It‘s a sadly complete illustration of how to cock up a film.

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