Mud, blood, crud, and genius

Rating: 9/10 (14 August 2009)

District 9 (R, 1:52) — 9 — SF, 2nd string, original
Years ago I read a story by Joan D. Vinge (possibly "The Outcasts of Heaven Belt"?) that was set on a decrepit old space station. Metal was rusted. Walkways were worn. Things were broken. Stuff didn't work. "Yessss!", I said to myself, "this is the way things would really be, not all shiny and efficient the way they're usually portrayed." And, when it comes to SF movies, by "usually" I mean "always".
Until now.
District 9 is grittily realistic. It's smeared with mud, covered with blood, and littered with crud. It's set in a slum and totally looks it. This alone would make it stand out from a crowd sufficiently to be remembered distinctly a decade from now, which is the minimal requirement I have for a 9 rating.
But it gets better. While the slum is on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, it's occupied not by the traditionally oppressed black people of that nation but by an alien race that undoubtedly has a name for itself but which is known to the humans as prawns, based on their appearance — human-sized and bipedal, but with features like a cross between a shrimp and a cockroach. The humans speak nothing but Afrikaans-accented English, and the prawns speak in their own guttural, croaking tongue (with subtitles), but we focus on characters of both races who have previously interacted with each other, so they're mutually intelligible.
The prawns are a desperate lot. Their gargantuan starship is parked above Joburg, where it's been stranded since 1982. It came to rest there and, after months of inactivity, humans had to cut their way in, where they discovered about a million starving, sickly aliens, apparently workers (or maybe slaves) on their way to someplace else, none of whom has the vaguest idea of where they are or how to run a spaceship. Out of humanitarian concern, the international community moves them into a refugee camp in the shadow of their spacecraft.
We advance to 2010, by which time most of humanity has turned its attention elsewhere but the South Africans haven't been able to, since District 9 and its now 1.8 million alien refugees are a constant presence — and possible threat. The government hires international megacorp MNU (Multi-National United) to relocate them to District 10, a much more comfortable 240 km away.
We see most of this in what appears to be documentary film and video clips, and that style continues as we follow MNU's Wikus Van De Merwe, head of the relocation team, as he begins the bureaucratic process of serving eviction notices. Things do not go well. Wikus is separated from the rest of his team and (without giving too much away) ends up in personal possession of the secret behind the aliens' weaponry, something that had baffled Earth scientists since they 1st tried to decipher the highly effective technology decades earlier. This makes Wikus a marked man, wanted by MNU, the government, the Nigerian crime lords who control commerce within District 9, and the prawns anxious to get their secrets back. Left with nowhere to run, Wikus finds an unlikely ally in "Christopher", a prawn with a bright, curious tagalong offspring. (Wikus refers to them both as male, but it's not at all clear that the term is either applicable or relevant.)
The video-clip style continues with the use of surveillance cameras and TV newscopter footage, but eventually that style fades out in favor of straight filming, albeit with a continuing hand-held style that's highly effective for the chaotic events depicted.
Again, the movie goes for a look and feel that are totally realistic, and it achieves those goals. It's riveting. It meets John W. Campbell's challenge to "describe to me an alien that thinks as well as a man but not like a man". The prawns are as memorable as Niven and Pournelle's moties.
While you've undoubtedly never heard of writer-director Neill Blomkamp before, nor any of the highly effective actors (notably Sharlto Copley as Wikus), the names of the producers and FX house may ring some bells: Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Weta Digital. Yes, just as good as you'd expect.
This is an absolute mustn't-miss film for SF fans and is likely to redefine our expectations for future SF films at least as much as The Matrix did. The audience at the midnight showing I attended broke out into spontaneous applause at the end. Deservedly so.