District 9 poster

New poster for District 9 (or else some really impressive fan art). This comes hot on the heels of Saturday’s NYTimes article announcing that “geek god” Peter Jackson will be making an appearance at Comic-Con to help promote the movie.

Come July 24, the director, a three-time Oscar winner, will face the mob in Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center in support of “District 9,” an alien-internment thriller set for release by Sony on Aug. 14. Mr. Jackson produced the film, which was directed by his friend Neill Blomkamp, who will also attend.

“I’m thrilled that I finally have the opportunity,” Mr. Jackson said in an e-mail message. “Neill is a tremendously talented young director, and he’s made an extraordinary film, so it was important to me to come to San Diego to spread the word.” He added that attendees will be in for “quite a ride,” but did not elaborate.

Big improvement over the earlier version of the target-practice poster (after the cut), because it tightens the focus, replicates an actual full-size firing-range silhouette — and doesn’t look like a paste-up collage. The older version takes the hyper-real spacecraft effects we see in the trailer, and makes them feel like a badly-matched matte painting. The close-up cropping of the new poster fixes those problems and emphasizes the one good idea from the old one.