Creative and involving film unfolding within this dystopian world full of aggression and hatred as an individual with a set task and existence is put through a wringer.

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2010)

District 9 is an exciting, raw and unflinching South African science fiction film; a piece that you feel is the result of years of studious work and hard graft finally come-good, work that has consequently broken into the world stage. If there was a reason to feel as if one was beginning to trawl through the latter stages of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, whilst at the mercy of New Zealand born director Peter Jackson, then it might very well have been so that one might be able to observe District 9 some years later. The reason for the mentioning of Jackson and his trilogy of yester-year is that, by way of a South African film maker named Neill Blomkamp, whom himself with District 9 has revisited a 2005 short entitled Alive in Joburg, is that Jackson green-lit the bigger, broader project; consequently turning it into a smart; intelligent; engrossing sci-fi which is only mainstream entertainment in appearance but is also something far more interesting. With District 9; Blomkamp has shown himself to be a filmmaker able to run on ideas and creativity born out of his own mind, but apparently to be able to execute these ideas with an ability to draw in a mass audience; when linking him to other directors born out of the former British Empire, one might very much mention him in the same breath as his apparent mentor here in Peter Jackson or, and time will tell, even someone like James Cameron.
But how does the film differ to any other space invaders-come-aliens landing from outer space piece? In the past, where intergalactic species have sought to destroy without mercy nor apparent reason; District 9 offers an eerily similar premise to proceedings but with an eye on developing this as a subplot around which their basing on planet Earth for twenty five odd years has already happened. A key scene from 1996's spectacle favouring, flag waving science fiction film Independence Day had a scene in which the incoming beasties inadvertently revealed their plan to us; one that revolved around going from planet to planet wiping out all traces of life, after which the rightful reaction ought to be: "that just sounds a little bit......rubbish". If ever there was a revisionist incoming beasties sci-fi action film in which said creatures felt, hurt and had personalities then District 9 is it. Although that statement itself raises a paradox some have brought about through 1990's Dances With Wolves, that while the Native Americans are deconstructed as the lead spends more time with them, the blood thirsty Apaches draw the short straw and stay as such. Most of the other aliens in this are these apparent dead brained, bug like creatures with an apparent ability for inter-galactic travel but remain quite primitive in attitudes and ideologies.
The film sees a huge ship hover above Johannesburg, South Africa in 1982; a mission to board it revealing a near-dying breed of tall bug-like creatures whom are brought back to Earth and just placed out of the way in a slum. The script has fun with a more American infused attitude to this material, faux interviewees telling us it didn't happen to land over a large American city and that expecting "bright, flashing lights" wasn't out of the question in what it a reference to Spielberg's Close Encounters film; itself a piece about aliens arriving without initial intent to annihilate. Cut to September 2010, and the extraction of the now proclaimed 'prawns' from this ghetto is to be headed up by a certain Wikus Van De Merwe (Copley), nothing more then a desk jobber at the MNU organisation charged with infiltrating the slum with weapons wielding law enforcers and clearing them out to a new zone, of which is later referred to by Wikus as resembling a concentration camp. In Wikus, and later his cohort in a prawn named Christopher Johnson, is a thoroughly nourishing character study. The po-faced pacifist Wikus talks goofily into the camera the faux-documentary crew film him with as they follow him around extraditing the Prawns, as more battle hardened; trigger happy law enforcers seem content to shoot first, ask questions later. After years of Apartheid rule, blacks and whites-alike are now seemingly aligned with one another in battering and turfing out a new breed of organism in the most merciless possible fashion. Didn't anybody learn anything?
The joy is in following Wikus' plight as he finds himself away from a previously well protected, bubbled existence, and accidentally sprays himself with a fluid Johnson had been storing in his shack, something that brings about the 'Prawnification' for that of whom it sprays, and the consequential falling apart of his life and alienation from his loving wife. Wikus' po-faced appearance gradually gives way as his body mutates and a visual sense of weary, bearded dishevelment settles in as he stands up to arms dealers and sheds his previous office laden image; a literal suiting up into this metallic, one man army suit nearer the end signalling the ultimate in this transition. Suddenly, solace can only be found in the Prawns and those he worked with, in the MNU, are after him for all sorts of sordid testing; the places of the respective characters' dwelling a routine but effective item used to highlight the distinction between the two: a plated shack and a large detached house. The film's premise and plot ideas revolving around chase and epiphanies are pretty standard, but are given leases of life and fresh interest through this lens of creativity. The film's antagonist is corruption: the enemies its lying media and conniving government with whom it operates; a skin headed, sadism revelling fascist mercenary taking the reigns as a physical villain towards the end; culminating in an unflinching look at a world full of hatred and rejection, in which the joy is watching people finding their psychological state torn and their physical identity in a disturbing process of transition.