Just in case you were convinced it was impossible to make a silly film about apartheid

Rating: 3/10 (21 October 2009)

I can't imagine what kind of viewer would find this film deep or metaphorical or anything other than a grand, slow-moving, grimly adolescent bore, but there are apparently many who have considered it a great work of art on themes of racism, immigration, and apartheid. It isn't. It's a smarmy, unnecessarily gory (and I have no objections whatever to gore), low-rent (in feel, if not actually in budget) scifi flick along the lines of Alien Nation (but about 50 times less adroit) that is so insecure of itself that it reminds you (constantly, nervously) who the bad guys are and who the good guys are and whacks you over the head every other scene with its deep and righteous sense of morality. If this is the best Metaphor for Xenophobia they could come up with, I am so scared. What no one seems to notice is a) that the aliens for whom we're supposed to be all filled with sympathy are actually pretty gross; the "good" alien (Christopher Johnson; a single father, to boot) who forms an uneasy alliance with Wikus van de Merwe doesn't even begin to make up for all the scenes of aliens doing things that are downright creepy and for which the film provides zero cultural context that might allow us to understand them in a different light; and b) that the actual blacks in the film are animals, almost literally. In other words, the great anti-racist "message" gets a little lost. Add to that the fact that Sharlto Copley (as van de Merwe) plays his scenes as if he were Sacha Baron Cohen and you get yet one more silly, superficial movie about racism that can't stop congratulating itself for how hip and meaningful it is.