Different approach

Rating: 7/10 (8 July 2010)

Dstrict 9 is quite a political movie. Too much politics for a truly great movie and still not enough of it.
D9 starts almost completely political correct. Poor refugees (albeit aliens) are somewhat stranded in Johannesburg. Unemployed and foreign they cause the usual social difficulties, especially growing racism. An ignorant government and a multinational and of course evil company threaten the poor existence of the aliens. So far so boring and predictable.
Fortunately the plot takes a turn. The rather stupid company executive, who is in charge for the relocation of the aliens, gets infected and slowly turns into an alien himself. Due to great acting and fine storytelling this kept me very interested and entertained.
In the end this executive defends an alien from the military. The alien escapes (with his son) and promises to return to save his kind. The executive survives and finishes his metamorphosis.
This all is filmed very well, with a fine balance of intellectual input and sufficient blood and gore.
But D9 is a political movie and has to be measured by its intentions and messages. Clearly it is a movie against racism. Fine. However it is extremely racist itself. South Africa has a multi-tier society. White people, black people from South Africa and black people from abroad. Who do you think is living in the worst slums? Right, people from Kenia, Nigeria, simply from the rest of Africa! And what kind of people are the most violent and superstitious ones in the movie? Nigerians! No racism here?! To me this ruins much of the credibility of the film.
And in order not to get too serious the movie has a neat little happy ending. Our hero (the mutating executive) meets an alien. The alien's son is some kind of technological whiz-kid, repairing all alien devices. Swell. So the movie lets father and son escape. Naturally they act not only to save themselves, but mainly to free their people. Seen a thousand times, you know. And nobody would take any precautions to blast the mother ship into oblivion in case anything like this might happen?
D9 is a nice entertaining movie, taking a different approach to tell all of us how bad racism is. But it's political correctness is predictable and the results are sugar-sweet. And it is inherently racist in itself. That makes it worth roughly 7 points.