a ruthless satire and a (mostly) kick-ass blockbuster

Rating: 8/10 (16 August 2009)

District 9 doesn't f*** around, mostly. It's a harsh look at a harsh people, mainly us. It asks a question posed countless times before: what would happen if "they" came "here" and how would we respond and they act. By the end of District 9, a movie where we see an alien ship stalled over Johannesburg and the million or so "prawn" aliens taken and put into a slum of the movie's title, you'll wonder deeply about our own ethical state of being. You might wonder also why Neill Blomkamp, the director (first time feature by the way), didn't show more of the aliens, at least until the second half of the film. This is intentional on his part because it's about drawing specific parallels in how human beings will look at a culture that is the "other", and I do mean "other".
And it doesn't have to be a parallel specifically to South Africa and the Apartheid, though that comparison can certainly be made if one seeks to. What about immigration in America, or even going back to how the US treated Indians? Or how about looking in the movie at the whole vicious cycle of taking a displaced people (without their leaders, by the way, which is why the "prawns" are so despondent to do anything on their stranded ship) who are put into a ghetto and basically put there to eventually be just 'eh, whatever, they can go somewhere else, they can die for all I care.' That the humans just shuffle the aliens around- as early on in the eviction scenes with Wilkus Van Der Merwe- lack understanding of them, and it's through these humans (and sometimes through a documentary-lens perspective) we have our point of view. That and, you know, the aliens just want to go home and all of that.
It gives us the story of Mr. Van Der Merwe, a bureaucrat at the MNU, the government group that oversees alien affairs in District 9 and after 20 years makes the decision to do a mass eviction to what is an even more cramped quarter a few miles away. But Van Der Merwe (a very common name in South Africa I'm told) gets infected by some spray in a can that one of the aliens named "Christopher" has been using for some special project, and soon poor Wilkus becomes the first human to be fused with alien DNA, growing fingers that can also operate the firearms the aliens brought and that no humans can really operate. A first-time movie actor Sharlto Copley is also revealed to us by Blomkamp in a fantastic performance for any actor; what my friend compared to Michael Scott from the Office turning into Cronenberg's Fly.
Blomkamp said that originally the film was going to have a final third that would have been "more cerebral" as opposed to the shoot-em-up that is now in the film. I'm not sure who will agree, but considering that he took the popcorn movie direction, it's not at all a bad course to have taken given the results. Blomkamp isn't the best action direction ever, but he does know something important with this type of story (and having Peter Jackson as producer doesn't hurt and only helps in this regard): visual effects matter. The aliens and their whole world, so to speak, that is brought to Earth looks wholly believable, and we're even given that contradiction of human eyes and a disgusting face (save for the child prawn) that makes it hard to really accept them as something living and thinking but they are. And the ship and its things look much better than other things in terms of crazy-CGI technology from this summer. Just compare, if you will, to last week's GI Joe and get a kick in the nuts as to what can be possible in stunning visual effects. It's here, really.
I can't say District 9 is perfect or even a great movie. It's hard to follow entirely with seeing the humans as being three-dimensional since they're either seen as military hard-heads or one-sided bureaucrats... and, of course, Wilkus the only human who has a transformation over the course of the film from mouse to man-mouse. But what intrigues is intriguing, and the satire is wicked-hot, much like a Romero film. We see an ugly side to nature, and maybe a sliver of hope, but mostly District 9 digs into us to make us ask what we think and feel about these creatures from another world. Would we do the same? Maybe we already have to our own fellow species? 8.5/10