Wow. Hilarious and unsettling and deeply original. Cat food anyone?

Rating: 8/10 (8 February 2010)

District 9 (2009)
Aliens in Johannesburg. A lot of them. And humans, without the usual fear of invasion from outer space, but a more normal fear of those who are Other, just plain different. What do you do with a million uncouth strangers who can't even speak English? Exploit them of course, and put them in a giant tent city. And make them victims of a modern bureaucracy, too, and ask them to sign papers for their own eviction from a squalid camp they never asked for in the first place. I'm surprised they didn't think to tax them, too.
Yes, this is District 9: inventive, preposterous, crude, grandiose, silly, disturbing. In spurts and surges, with talking head experts and creaky sci-fi effects, District 9 downright crazy, too. Above all, though, it's a relief. It isn't a Hollywood version of the same clever idea, and though I might like to see that slicker, and probably more sentimental movie, this one is a rare divergence, valuable for its diverging. Unlike many European films and their sibling American Indies, this South African production aims high, and big. And it pulls off some happy combination of absurd and profound in an entertaining, unpolished hybrid. It creaks and groans are unfortunate, and the plot could use some depth, but the whole situation, and the suspension of believability required, are fabulous.
It's worth saying, at the start, that the monsters (of which there are an unreasonable 1.8 million during the main part of the movie) are unappealing, grotesque, violent things, vaguely human in shape, but eating raw goats heads and, their favorite treat, cans of can food (including the can, it seems, or at least without a can opener). But if this is enough for some viewers to wish them all dead, or at least wish them all to go home, it doesn't seem to bother the human population. Maybe this looks like small potatoes compared to Apartheid, a parallel lost on many younger and most outsider viewers. But the crux of the movie is the apparent kindness of humanity to help the aliens in their time of trouble (their spaceship broke down).
The plot doesn't quite devolve into a good guy bad guy movie, though there is a particular bumbling, lovable hero at the center of it. It does resort to half an hour of chasing and shooting toward the end, with lots of effects not far removed from a contemporary video game. The fact that you are rooting for the aliens by then should strike you as odd, and in fact it might strike you as a parallel to a truly Hollywood movie with similar threads (stereotypes of aliens and macho humans battling for survival), have you heard of Avatar? But give this one a chance to get to you more poignantly (with less of the sweeping oh my effect of more expensive movies) and you'll maybe get what's good here.