Aliens in Jo'burg

Rating: 9/10 (10 June 2011)

In films when a giant spacecraft arrives on Earth the aliens are greeted by friendly humans then to proceed to wage war on humanity; here things are different. When the aliens arrive their ship doesn't appear to be functioning and they are starving. The million or so alien refuges are then forced to live in the eponymous District 9; a squalid Johannesburg township. Here they live for twenty years until it is decided to move them away from the city. The man in charge of the evacuation is Wikus Van de Merwe; an ordinary civil servant, certainly not the sort of character one would expect to take the lead in a science fiction action film. While serving eviction notices he accidentally becomes contaminated by an alien device, he soon gets ill and is horrified when one of his arms becomes like that of the aliens. His superiors don't help him though; they take him to a lab where they plan to vivisect him as his new arm gives him the ability to fire alien weapons something no other human can do. He manages to escape but the only place he can hide is in District 9; here he will have to earn the trust of the aliens as well as avoiding security forces who want to capture him and Nigerian gangsters who want to eat his arm! His struggle will see him fighting his own people alongside an alien is some fairly spectacular and slightly gory action scenes.
I really enjoyed this film; it made a nice change to see a film set in modern Africa that wasn't a worthy film about various bad things happening to the people there. It is possible to see the treatment of the aliens as a metaphor for the old apartheid system but it isn't too heavy-handed. I don't know if the actors are well known in South Africa but they were all unknown to me, which had the advantage that I didn't immediately know who the hero of the film, was going to be. Much of the early part of the film was filmed as though it was being filmed by a news-crew giving it a realistic feel even when there were loads of CGI aliens on screen! The actors were good; especially Sharlto Copley who played Van de Merwe; he wasn't your standard action hero but brought plenty of humanity and a degree of vulnerability to the role. If you are a fan of science fiction and haven't seen this yet I highly recommend you give it a go.