Neill Blomkamp is credited with directing epic sci-fi films such as District 9, Elysium and Chappie. Those three plots loosely follow the idea of what happens in the future when aliens or robots collide with humans.
The 2009 film District 9 was arguably his best work, and earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, Best Visual Effects, Editing, and Adapted Screenplay. Not bad, eh?
It appears as though he's returning this style of storytelling in his latest short film Rakka. The full, 21-minute movie has been uploaded to YouTube for everyone to see, and it's full-on. The trailer dropped a little more than two weeks ago and fans were excited.
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Set in Texas in 2020, it's about an unknown alien group colonising earth and the struggle of humans trying to take it back. Blomkamp has recruited Eugene Khumbanyiwa to star in the flick, who also had a starring role in District 9. He's also cast Sigourney Weaver, who is no stranger to alien flicks.
The alien creatures are superior to humans in every way and even have the benefit of telekinesis as well as mind control. Great, the future seems great. They burn down forests and build megastructures that change the bloody atmosphere, making it harder to breathe.
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Oh, and the aliens perform some seriously fucked up operations on humans - one in particular seems to involve a scary alien rewiring a human's brain and the next time we see that poor bloke, he's limping through a desolate street with a seriously bulging neck.
Despite it being only 21-minutes long, the cinematography and special effects are phenomenal. There are some epic slow-motion shots combined with some very dystopian looking locations.
It ends on cliff-hanger and there are apparently three more short films left to be released. So, if you're a fan of this one - there's only creepier alien stuff coming your way.
If you're wondering where Blomkamp gets all these fucked-up projects from, back in 2009 he described his pretty pessimistic world view to AV Club: "You have out-of-control population growth... We are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. Ever. And I think that, within 40 or 50 years, we'll be there.
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"If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential decline, what happens first is you get increases in wealth discrepancy, which means that you get rich pockets of gated communities with security guards outside them, and you get more and more poverty outside that area.
"And the resources go down, and people start having resource wars over water and food and agriculture and arable land, and then you have Joburg in 2050. And you can see signs of it everywhere. It's just overpopulation and lack of resources. We just aren't in control of our destiny."
Well, that's certainly ruined my day.
But the scary thing is, he's not wrong. Let's just hope he's wrong about a reptilian alien species invading earth in three years and turning it into an absolute shit storm.
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