Outlander, Avatar and District 9

Okay, so I've sat down and watched all three of these films in the last few days. I've had my intense sci-fi head on recently as I'm working on new material so I was probably a bit more involved than usual.

Outlander was pretty stupid but it was good fun. The fact that the hero of the story was from outer space and he found himself in the age of Vikings made no impact on the story and it was a shame that not more was made of who he was or where he came from - that ruined it a bit for me. The whole backstory he tells towards the end was great, though, and could have been a movie of it's own. It was good, and the action scenes were great. Ron Perlman as a Viking nutjob - cinema gold.

Avatar was what I expected it to be. It was very involving and looked amazing - there were moments you forget the smurfs are digitally rendered and you really get involved with them and their culture. Truth be told, though, the story was hardly original - in fact, it was pretty dull - and the characters were a bit bland and predictable, especially the loud-'n-nasty military leader. It was a great film and I really enjoyed it. The action scenes were amazing and the world of Pandora was fantastic. I hope we get to visit it again soon.

District 9 was my favourite of the bunch. The mixture of documentary, fly-on-the-wall, security cameras, news footage and standard filmaking was a fantastic mix, and the story and characters were so well defined, especially the alien Christopher, that you felt part of the whole thing. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. If Moon hadn't blown me away so completely then this would have been my best movie of the last year.

Great films. I can recommend them all.