What a different and interesting alien movie.

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2009)

I am so aggravated! I just almost finished typing a very complete set of comments here, and accidentally hit a key that wiped it all out!! Well, one more time...
This movie was made by a group very inexperienced in movie-making, and with actors that had little experience in movies. To turn out an effort this good is amazing in itself. It will be interesting to see if the movie maintains its lofty IMDb rating once greater numbers of votes roll in.
The movie begins as a documentary. A very large structure, essentially a very large space ship, has been suspended for some time over the Johannesburg, SA area. Eventually they are able to work their way inside it and find perhaps a million aliens in poor shape. They decide to remove them and relocate them to an area outside the city named "District 9."
At first blush the aliens appear to be more like large insects with two legs and two arms. I found myself wondering "why don't they just exterminate them?" But as we see more, they have intelligence and a language, and obviously had operated the large ship through space and into our world. One thing removed from the ship were large, powerful weapons which can only be fired by someone (something?) with the alien DNA, so the government is trying to figure out how to make them useful.
The lead actor is South African Sharlto Copley as Wikus Van De Merwe. He is put in charge of the effort, after a few years, to evict the aliens from District 9 and relocate to another area. But while searching one hut he is sprayed with a mysterious fluid, which eventually begins to turn parts of him into alien-like.
The rest of the movie is hard to describe, much easier to understand when viewed. Overall a very good, different alien movie.