Refreshing sci-fi film, although the first few minutes look bad.

Rating: 6/10 (16 May 2010)

District 9 is a true Sci-fi movie, and a refreshing one. Human race making contact with an Alien race is a classic theme, but this movie explores it from new angle and brings new depth to it, and does that on a superior level.
Altho the beginning is discouraging and shaky - documentary style looking like a student exercise, and i have to say my first attempt to watching District 9 ended right there, soon it gets on its feet and takes you on a great ride.
The Aliens in District 9 do arrive, but remain stationed aboard their spaceship, suspended enigmatically above Johannesburg city, South Africa. They do not try to contact us or attack us, and don't seem to be enterprising anything at all. When we finally approach their ship and make contact, we find their society disintegrated into a horde of brutalized individuals only interested in eating and breeding. Their legacy is great - artifacts that our corporations would be happy to have, but it responds only to alien DNA. Cramped inside a camp called District 9 in the vicinity of their spaceship still up in the sky, the aliens go on with their despicable way of life for decades, multiplying into millions, finally becoming too much of a nuisance, so they are about to be relocated.
This is a refreshing premise. I have to really concentrate to remember a "sci-fi" whose aliens do not try to destroy us in any way they can, eat our brains, mate with our sexy lead actresses or vandalize our landmarks running them over with their spaceships, and what not.
In District 9, our (unintentional) hero is the average guy, Wikus, a civil servant, married with the daughter of his Boss, working for this corporation in charge with the aliens, and he is commissioned to relocate them. He has to descend amidst the filth and misery of the Alien camp, and get out of there with the job done, while he is filmed for the world to see the corporation is humane.
While so many movies out there - not only sci-fies - have the hero emotionally changed after experiencing the suffering of the weak, District 9 cleverly explores the possibilities a sci-fi offers: at the end of the day, acquitted of his duty, Wikus remains emotionally untouched by the realities of the camp, but he is changing physically, a process that will alienate him from his own, turning him into a prized artifact, hunted by the very corporation he worked for a day before.
All Wikus wants is to return to the comfort of his former life, happy in the arms of his wife, and complex depths of the relation "individual vs society" unfold, as his salvation can only come from an alien - Christopher, father of a son, who wants to save his own people, but whose only hope is Wikus, who has to deliver him a much needed artifact the humans hold.
Everything now accelerates into an action movie, shot almost as a first person shooter game, and this part does feel like Half-Life game put on film, which i consider an achievement. We experience the alien weaponry in action, and when they're unleashed against the corporation's military commandos, they look and behave otherworldly, devastating in both their effect and screen presence. The sci-fi inventory is completed with an awesome Bio-Mech, the interior of an alien shuttle cabin, and the corporation xeno labs facility, while all the intense fighting taking place stays hardcore, avoiding gratuitous explosions, and throwing a lot of blood and gibs at the camera.
By the last part of the film, the unending hunt for Wikus and Christopher the alien is becoming dreary, but the director saves it just in time, reaching a conclusion, documentary style again, disappointing, but the closing scene saves the last impression of the film, in a fresh new way.
PS. Director Neill Blomkamp seems very daring and promising technically, but what he does looks more like playing with winning recipes from other genres: I've recognized "The Passion of the Christ" and "Half-Life", they kept me entertained, but inbetween them there was little speaking of a style of his own.