Genre: Sci-Fi
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Writers: Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell
Cast: Sharlto Copley; Vanessa Haywood; Kenneth Nkosi; Jason Cope; David James; Devlin Brown; William Allen Young; Mandla Gaduka
MPAA rating: R (for bloody violence and pervasive language)
Summary: An extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth suddenly finds a kindred spirit in a government agent that is exposed to their biotechnology.
Run time: 112 min
[This Review Contains Minor Spoilers]
Over the course of my life I have seen too many Sci-Fi films to count and it’s apparently impossible to create an alien based film that does not (intentionally or unintentionally) heist from films of the past and while the mothership hovering over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa is reminiscent of shots in Close Encounters or Independence Day to name a few, that is really where any similarities end.
District 9 is part political commentary, part sci-fi epic and part tragically heroic drama. Blomkamp admittedly drew inspiration from his South African history and it’s true life tumultuous apartheid heritage but he does a great job of shrouding it in the guise of sci-fi that it doesn’t come across as a heavy handed moral message.
While the comparisons to Cloverfield in it’s shaky cam psuedo documentary opening are fair, those of you who are distracted by it will be happy to know that it doesn’t carry throughout the film and is not nearly as nauseating as it was in Cloverfield. While I’m not a big fan of that style, I do appreciate the intent to add realism to the beginning of District 9 by using it and it truly does pay off.
District 9 is an expansion of Blomkamp’s 2005 six-minute short film, Alive in Joburg, which provides a glimpse of the chaos and racism that ensues throughout Johannesburg as the aliens attempt to integrate into human society.
The aliens are nicknamed “prawns” by the locals, as they do not look or sound remotely human, they more closely resemble something along the lines of a bipedal shrimp/grasshopper hybrid and communicate through a series of clicks, grunts and gurgles that humans have learned to translate.
While we get little back story and no origin of the aliens, we do find out that they first appeared hovering over South Africa back in 1982, they were starving and ill and end up being rescued from their derelict spacecraft and quarantined in the slums (District 9), a place designed to evoke the historical, apartheid era Cape Town and mirroring the forced removal of District 6’s inhabitants during the 1970s, and the main plot of District 9 revolves around an effort to relocate the prawns to another concentration camp more than 200 kilometers outside the city.
Inside the slum, Nigerian gangsters set up a criminal enterprise in which they trade food (mostly cat food) and sex for money and alien weaponry, the latter are largely unusable because they are compatible only with users bearing the biological signature of the aliens.
A private corporation called Multi-National United (MNU) is contracted to provide security for the prawns but they seem to have more nefarious ideas. District 9’s plot focuses on MNU’s new head of field operations, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley). While I’m rarely impressed with an actor’s performance these days, Copley was amazing and his ablility to play a character who undergoes such a massive evolution over such a short time period is astonishing. There was a point in the middle of the movie that I had forgotten for a second that he was the same character from the beginning of the film. I want to clarify that it only felt that way for a second, it in no way made the film feel disjointed in any way.
There are some loose ends in the plot and I would have liked more detailed background on the origin of the aliens, for instance what happened that brought them to Earth in the first place, why are they ill and malnourished or even what planet (fictional or not) did they come from? These are really small problems in the grand scheme of things and there is far more to applaud than their is to criticize in this film.
The effects, weapons and vehicles were all amazing, WETA/WETA Digital did a fantastic job and could easily garner some awards for their work on District 9.
This movie is definitely the freshest film concept to come along in quite some time. So if you’re looking for the perfect balance of thought provoking story, realistic digital effects and great sci-fi action, District 9 is definitely a movie for you.
I give ‘District 9’ Four Out of Five Stars
