sci-fi with style and depth

Rating: 8/10 (2 February 2010)

As "District 9" opens, we learn that a mysterious spaceship has been hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa since 1982. After years of trying unsuccessfully to integrate the more than a million aliens who arrived on it into regular society, government officials have decided to move them out of the slum, known as District 9, where they now reside, to District 10, a camp located far away from the city (the aliens are referred to derisively as "Prawns," due to their crustacean-like appearance). Trouble begins when Wikus Van De Merwe, a field operator for the MNU (Multinational United), becomes exposed to a mysterious alien substance while in the process of evacuating the camp, a substance that causes him to slowly turn into a Prawn himself. Immediately, the MNU wants to dissect him to better understand how to operate the aliens' weaponry (for some reason human DNA renders the weapons useless in human hands). However, Wikus escapes and becomes a fugitive from justice, finally hooking up with an alien who may possibly be able to help him retrieve his full humanity.
(Though set in South Africa, the movie's provenance is actually New Zealand).
Shot partly in the style of a you-are-there documentary and partly as a conventional third-person narrative, this relatively low-budget ($30 million) thriller, written by Neil Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell and directed by Blomkamp, is high on creativity, raw energy and imagination and low on sci-fi movie clichés (the overused fugitive-on-the-run scenario being one of the few concessions it makes in that regard). "District 9" also provides more food-for-thought than the average big-budget movie in this genre. Like "Alien Nation," it uses the arrival of outer space visitors to weave a thought-provoking parable about such relevant social issues as prejudice, governmental and corporatist secrecy and propaganda, black market exploitation of the masses, and xenophobia. The script also deviates from the standard formula by making the aliens neither pointy-headed super-intellectuals light years ahead of us in knowledge, nor unthinking villains bent on colonization and destruction, nor namby-pamby sentimentalists reaching out a hand of friendship from across the cosmos. They are just worker drones who happened to get stranded on a strange planet, whose generally compassionate inhabitants invited them to stay on - albeit, clearly as second-class citizens, as it turns out. The movie also captures some of the poignancy of the 1986 version of "The Fly," as piece by piece, Wikus loses the one thing that defines what he is - his humanity. Yet, ironically it is in becoming less human - in being able to more fully identify with an "other" to the point of extraordinary self-sacrifice - that he becomes most human (a theme not unlike the one in "Avatar," actually).
Even with all its impressive CGI effects and hardware, "District 9" would not be half the movie it is without the extraordinary performance of Sharlto Copley who, as Wikus, provides the picture with the human heartbeat it needs to be effective. A somewhat bumbling, barely competent bureaucrat is not an obvious choice for a an action movie hero, but Copley makes that very tricky transition seem utterly natural and seamless. Wikus is a good-hearted man who's forced by circumstances to perform actions he wouldn't normally perform just to survive, yet he remains true to his moral code most of the way through. It is he and he alone who lifts "District 9" to the level of compelling human drama.
Excellent special effects, exciting action sequences, some subtle social satire (particularly in the early stretches) and moments of surprising tenderness all combine to make "District 9" a one-of-a-kind movie-going experience.