Original, Riveting and Thought-Provoking

Rating: 9/10 (22 August 2009)

The documentary feel gave the film an element of reality along with moments of seemingly unscripted (but really scripted) mistakes in filming. Aliens living in a South African ghetto called District 9 are not pretty. They look like bugs we might spray or swat. But they are taller than humans. Their appearance makes it easy for the government officials to mistreat them. We learn how they are treated in the early part of the movie as the aliens are being evicted from a squalid Johannesburg slum and being relocated to another concentration camp.
Themes of prejudice, marginalization and ethnocentrism dominate most of the film, but we must change how we feel about these creatures to feel empathy.
The human protagonist is a petty official who is collecting acknowledgments from the aliens on notices of eviction, apparently some legal requirement. Most of the aliens do not read. The human is vain, preens for the camera, and explains the process of eviction. While serving papers to the aliens with his security force behind him, he comes in contact with a substance which causes his metamorphosis. His transformation is a Kafka nightmare.
Corporate greed is to blame for much of the inhumanity, and as our proxy becomes more like the aliens, he becomes the recipient of the same inhospitable treatment he visited on our visitors.
This is not a perfect film, but it is exciting, thought-provoking and fun.
See it.