Highly conceptual but also very derivative. The phenomenal narrative style compensated it all.

Rating: 8/10 (12 September 2009)

Highly conceptual but also very derivative. The phenomenal narrative style compensated it all.
District 9 must be one of the most innovative movie of the year, but I'd say it looked very familiar to those who had ever played a Half-life game or Doom game. The story is actually based on Frantz Kafka's La metamorfosis the novel, in which a depressed blue collar woke up to find himself transformed into a huge bug one morning, and eventually alienated by all his families and died in desperate. District 9 fetched the character of Gregorio Samsa the main protagonist from La metamorfosis and one can easily relate the character in this movie to the novel. The whole feeling, the anti-corporation theme and the apocalyptic atmosphere are all admirable in the movie. Yet this movie was shot in South Africa the place for racial issues, adding more dramatic dynamics to the storyline. In the beginning of the movie, several social workers and related personals were interviewed like a real documentary, and everyone commented on the event in his/her view. One can also easily forget that this is a sci-fi movie and consider them commenting on real racial problems. All of these are very impressive and made the first act of the movie. And later...
Bang! District 9 changed its subtitle from La metamorfosis to Half-life. The infected main protagonist was considered most valuable yet most dangerous by the evil capitalists. He finally broke away from capture and took the aliens side. With alien genes, he was able to handle alien weapons from Rail Gun, BFG, Lightening Gun from Doom(Quake) to Gravity Gun and energy pulse rifle from Half-life. Most fantastically he played Iron Man for 10 minutes in the climax and blew a lot of humans into jam and juice.
Well, this is a movie one can go to purely for its visual effects. Given its $30 million budget, it's really very impressive and more effective than Cloverfield. The shaky camera and the relatively realistic visual presentation will grab your eyeballs for 100 minutes, and make you impulsive to tell others to see it now! However, if you reflect on it you'd probably find a lot problems like underdeveloped technical details and insufficient explanations on both the alien side and human side. Maybe that will leave more space to its sequel, hopefully. The alien weaponry were all created as a homage to popular video games and lack a totally fresh feeling. But we can live with that. You won't want to see it on DVD. Ratherly, you would want to see it in full HD.
Anyway it's still a great movie and a good reason to go to cinema. 8/10.