What I Think About Movies I've Seen

It's 2016, and some areas of Paris have been converted to walled-off, self-governed districts. One of these, District 13, is ruled by a number of heavily-armed gangs. It's a pretty seedy place, but there's plenty of corruption outside of its walls as well. Within some of the highest ranks of the French government, there is a plan to incite further lawlessness so that there will be enough public outcry to justify destroying District 13 and rebuilding it, padding their pockets along the way with kickbacks from the companies that will be contracted to perform the cleanup and rebuilding.

One of the most heavily-marketed aspects of this movie is its focus on Parkour, a kind of extreme sport in which the participants try to cover a lot of ground quickly and navigate over, around, and through obstacles in a very athletic manner. It's hard to describe the fast-paced, high-risk nature of the action, but it's something that can be likened to what you typically see in from Jackie Chan, or the first scene of Daniel Craig's Casino Royale. It was featured in several scenes, although there wasn't quite as much of it as I was led to believe. Apparently the 2004 prequel, just called District 13, does have quite a bit more (I haven't seen it, although it is available for streaming on Netflix so I'll probably check it out). The Parkour scenes that it did have were pretty impressive, although it's not clear how much special-effects enhancement they got.

This movie is in French with English subtitles, although you wouldn't know it from the trailer, because it's all in English (although after watching it again, there's only voiceover and no one actually speaks). I've seen quite a few foreign-language films and subtitling usually doesn't bother me, but in this case I thought that they were rather poorly executed because they were always displayed in plain white text without any kind of border or solid background, and it was frequently difficult to read that text when the image behind it was lightly-colored. There were only a couple of scenes in which I couldn't read a word or two, but it was much more distracting than it should have been. Fortunately, the scenes that are heavy on action are light on dialog, so you don't have to worry too much about missing any excitement by struggling to read along.

I did enjoy this movie, but I think that it would have been a lot better if it had more action and they did a better job making the subtitles readable. I'll definitely have to check out the prequel to see if it did either or both of those better.