ICONIC REVIEW SCORE: 9/10
District 9 is an imaginative idea wrapped in familiar garb - so much so there's a risk of overlooking director Neill Blomkamp's cunning twists of sci-fi convention.
It concerns the arrival on Earth of bothersome aliens, an event so familiar to moviegoers, it's liable to elicit more yawns than shrieks from the audience. Alien tourists have been treated seriously (The Day the Earth Stood Still) and not so seriously (Mars Attacks!) for almost as long as there have been movies.
Think of how Blomkamp might have made this. He could have fashioned the aliens to be as cuddly as E.T. or WALL-E, to elicit sympathy in their similar plight of being stranded on a hostile planet. Instead he's made them insect-like and repulsive, scorned by humans under the pejorative term "prawns." You have to overcome your gag reflex to even look at them, especially when subplots involving alien sex and cannibalism kick in.
Blomkamp could have made his human protagonist a dashing hero, someone like Will Smith in Independence Day. Instead, Blomkamp puts the dramatic burden on wiry newcomer Sharlto Copley, whose bureaucratic alien wrangler Wikus van der Merwe is like a cross between Adolf Hitler and Inspector Clouseau.
Blomkamp could also have made much more of the film's Johannesburg setting and allusions to South African apartheid, a racist divide of blacks and whites that officially ended a generation ago, yet is still being sorted out at street level. Instead, the filmmaker lets his images carry the film's unspoken message: colour becomes irrelevant when all of humanity feels threatened.
All of these risky - and thoughtful - choices make District 9 a far more forceful movie than your average alien invasion saga. In a summer where toy robots and action heroes have rocked the box office and killed brain cells, it's nice to see a movie where some serious thought has been put into reviving a stale genre.
Blomkamp, a South African-born Canadian currently based in Vancouver, has had the advantage of several years of thinking and tweaking to improve his film. District 9 began as a 2005 viral web short called Alive in Joburg, which formed the nucleus of the tale. Refugee aliens arrive in a giant spaceship from a dying planet, seeking to make use of Earth's electricity and water and hoping Earthlings will happily share. Instead the humans respond by rounding up the docile aliens and locking them behind barbed wire in a filthy shantytown, shades of the ghettos of Soweto.
With the production support of his mentor Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) and co-writing with fellow Canadian Terri Tatchell, Blomkamp expanded on the concepts of Alive in Joburg to make District 9 a smart and mostly satisfying sci-fi excursion, retaining its faux documentary style, handheld cinematography and low-budget blockbuster brio.
Copley's Wikus seems like a standard-issue government bureaucrat, although he works for a private company called Multi-National United (MNU). The firm is tasked with managing a motley band of aliens - which have almost doubled in number since one million of them arrived near death 20 years earlier.
Comfort for these creatures isn't the issue. MNU just wants to herd them into a bigger concentration camp, called District 10, about 200 kilometres away from Johannesburg. Out of sight, out of mind for the docile "prawns," who possess weapons but don't fire them, and who savour tins of cat food, one of the film's many dark satiric touches.
Wikus is in charge of the evacuation of District 9, a job he approaches with gusto and some recklessness. Something happens that dramatically changes his circumstances, both physically and mentally. He becomes a hunted man, wanted by both his former MNU allies and by Nigerian gangster Obesandjo (Eugene Khumbanyiwa) who wants to exploit the alien weaponry.
Wikus crosses paths with a highly evolved alien the humans have dubbed Christopher (Jason Cope), a dad who is determined to protect his young son. Desperate times make for strange allies.
It's only when the film yields to violence in the final stretch that it begins to lose some of its creative heat. There's also the dilemma that the aliens are just too far out to empathize with. They have a face full of tentacles - something like Davey Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean - that makes emotional connections almost impossible. How do you look an insect in the eye? They also speak in a language that requires subtitles.
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This is the best film of 2010, the special effects are fantastic.
Shaun , Manchester