Cronenberg Meets Black Hawk Down

Rating: 8/10 (3 December 2012)

This is a very strange film . It's one that opened to rave reviews , critical acclaim and picked up several Oscar nominations . Surpringly it was directed by someone who had never directed a feature length film before and the lead actor was someone who never appeared in a film and had no previous professional acting experience . A recipe for disaster ? Certainly and it says something that director Neill Blomkamp and lead actor Sharlto Copley are able to paper over some glaring cracks and make a very enjoyable action packed sci-fi thriller
Like a few other highly regarded sci-fi classics there's something fundamentally wrong with the scenario . An alien mother-ship hovers outside Johannesburg in South Africa where the aliens dubbed " Prawns " by humanity live in a shanty town . It's no coincidence that the Prawns land in post apartheid South Africa since the subtext revolves around speciesism . What doesn't make sense however is the fact that an alien race can travel around the Galaxy and for some unknown reason decide to sit around for 20 years in conditions most human being would find difficult to tolerate . There's also something annoying about the way aliens talk to humans in their native tongue while humans reply in English . Put it like this: how many times do you as an English speaker talk to someone who is foreign in English , they reply in their tongue , you reply to them in English , they reply in .... You see what I'm getting at . It's a bit like the film version of THE PLANET OF THE APES where no one notices that either ape or human everyone is able to speak perfect English and yet no one notices this
There's also the element that the film is divided in to three very distinctive acts . There's the first third composed of the mockumentary /biting satire element . The second act of Wikus turning in to a Prawn and the final act of a big battle scene where Wikus and his Prawn ally trying to escape the Nigerians and the security contractors . The second act sits uneasily between the first and final thirds . Possibly because it's not as entertaining . Certainly the first third works very well with its aspects of satire and humour along with the point that everyone is racist when it comes to aliens who look like crustaceans and the end sequences are action packed. As I said Neill Blomkamp could have directed an absolute mess of a movie with three distinctive acts but he manages to pull it off . Copley does over do his geekish charaterisation early in the film but he improves as he turns in to a Prawn and ultimately an action hero and reminded me greatly of Edward Norton
There's not much wrong with DISTRICT 9 . Some flaws are fairly obvious but they're negated by a very talented director . It's slightly derivative but when you stop to consider this cost a mere $30 million dollars you have to stop and ask yourself why do film directors like James Cameron and Michael Bay feel the need to spend several times making movies that are a tiny fraction as involving and as compelling than something like this one ?