It's taken me a week to really digest this movie before writing a review partly because it was one of the most unusual films I have seen in a long time. From South African first time director Neill Blomkamp comes a movie that is at times so startlingly original that you wonder how on earth this guy hasn't been directing full length features for years. The movie begins as we follow a documentary film crew as they interview various characters to let us know how an alien spaceship came to be hovering over Johannesburg. We meet the lead character in the film, Wikus van der Merwe, an agent for a shady Haliburton style corporation called Multi-National United or MNU that manages District 9. District 9 is the name of the slum where the aliens have been kept since their arrival on earth as a sick and starving group of 'workers' whose leaders are for whatever reason absent. We never find out the real name of the alien race but instead are introduced to them as 'Prawns' a derogatory term coined by the MNU staff who manage District 9.
While trying to move the aliens to a new slum Wikus ("Get your fookin' tentacle out of my face!") becomes infected by being sprayed in the face with an alien fluid resulting in his partial transformation into the alien species. Immediately ostracized by MNU he becomes a fugitive and tries to work with the alien that created the fluid in order to return him to a fully human state. Naturally things don't go according to plan and Wikus ends up reliant on the aliens he previously persecuted as an MNU agent to save his life.
Throw in some Nigerian gangsters, inter-species prostitution, very groovy alien weaponry and a social commentary on the Apartheid era of South Africa and you end up with one of the most original movies to hit your multiplex in a very long time.
The fact that the movie is made and set in South Africa and not the States is refreshing on many levels. The accents of the actors, the setting of Johannesburg slums (check out the very real story of District 6 here), the cultural references and slang used in the script all go to make this a very different sci-fi movie. According to IMDB 'all the shacks in District 9 were actual shacks that exists in a section of Johannesburg which were to be evacuated and the residents moved to better government housing, paralleling the events in the film'.
Wikus is played by the clearly talented Sharlto Copley, an actor working in his first full length motion picture! To say great things are ahead for this guy is an understatement. Credit also has to go to the visual effects team on this movie as at no point do you question that you are watching CGI created aliens, such is the quality of their work.
The film gets going very quickly and soon turns into a wild ride that any moviegoer would enjoy. District 9 to me is like a popcorn sci-fi flick crossed with a smart socially aware foreign movie and the result is dynamite. I didn't have many expectations going into this film and frankly the only reason I went to see it was because i like movies with aliens and movies made in other countries! In the end what I saw was a revelation on many levels, including being very funny at times, and it will certainly be in the running when it comes to my Top Ten films of 2009.
Rating: *****
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