Thoughtful, violent, awesome sci-fi flick

Rating: 9/10 (16 August 2009)

This movie starts off in a bit of a jarring style, like an episode of "COPS" meets "the X-Files" meets CNN as it fills in the background of the story: Alien ship hovers over Johannesburg, earth people eventually decide to intercept it, finding scores of malnourished and sick aliens aboard. These aliens are taken to the planet surface and interred at a fenced in area known as District 9. Twenty years go by, the aliens live among the trash in what has grown into a crowded slum. Enter the new head of the "eviction" process, Wikus Van De Merwe. This eviction is designed to move all these cat-food eating trash-dwelling aliens into a facilitywell, a little further away from the city. What follows is then a terrifying story about transformation, violence, intolerance, and ultimately, salvation. At times this is a hard movie to watch, with all the vomiting and noise and very jarring narrative style. It settles in to a more conventional story about halfway through, as we see the main character and an alien named "Christopher" working together, and then we see the horror inflicted upon the aliens in District 9. There is a lot to like here. This is a visually interesting movie with a lot of real-world parallels, and it has many elements of other sci-fi: Alien Nation, Aliens, Transformers, The X-Files, and maybe any number of Outer Limits episodes come to mind. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but anyone who is into thoughtful science-fiction should definitely check it out.