District 9

A gritty and original story that is as entertaining as thought-provoking, combining xenophobic satire and political allegory with raucous action. 8/10

**For a low-budget film, it's a good effort.** I'm not a big fan of films about aliens, so the film won't be my cup of tea at all. However, that didn't stop me from seeing it, and appreciating what's good about it. Without a colossal budget or a powerful studio, director Neill Blomkamp gives us an intelligent and technically impactful film. In fact, it is in the most technical details that I felt impressed by the film: we have extraordinary cinematography, with magnificent light and colors. The effects and CGI used are very good and prove that you don't need an endless bag of money to get a good result. The ship is strange enough and the aliens are credible enough, with a bizarre but elaborate and well-made appearance, and the way they speak is, at the same time, expressive and enigmatic. Much of the film was filmed in a real South African slum, and it is difficult to see that human beings are still living in such an environment. The director bet on little-known actors, and this gives some additional credibility to the list of characters that were created here. Sharlto Copley is perhaps the easiest to recognize, as he has worked on some of the most widely circulated productions. Here, he is able to, at least, give us a worthy performance without major flaws... the only colossal flaw is not the actor's fault, but the script's, which gave his character a name very prone to jokes and puns in my mother tongue (I think French and even Spanish speakers will also understand): Wicus van de Merwe. The film's biggest problem is the weakness of the script. It seems to me that the film attempted a kind of social criticism by placing, instead of human people, strange aliens in that filthy slum. Is the film a sharp criticism of the way we discriminate and segregate those we consider inferior or different from us? If so, I understand, but perhaps I was one of the few to understand. It's the only explanation for the way the film begins: instead of taking sick aliens to a laboratory and spending decades studying them in depth, are we going to put them in a filthy slum? It doesn't make any sense to me.

The first twenty minutes or so of this is presented as if it were a documentary and with information whizzing about all over the place and tiny onscreen graphics attempting to set the scene, I found it really quite annoying. I was tempted to just give up, but gladly I didn’t because once it gets going it’s really quite good. Perhaps aliens have been watching the telly over the years so this time they have decided to skip the expected military welcome they’ve always received in the USA and gone to South Africa. Their mother ship parks itself above Johannesburg bearing a cargo of critters (they bear quite a resemblance to Arnie’s pals in “Predator”) who are looking for somewhere to live. The solution? Well that’s the favela-style shanty town called “District 9” where they are left in an almost feral squalor to fend for themselves. What proves to be of far more interest to humanity is their isomorphic weaponry, and when we discover a rather brutal way of getting round that security feature then things become even more perilous for the visitors. Determined to relocate the million-odd population, it falls to the nominally civilian process led by “Wikus” (Sharlto Copley) to organise their movement, but that never goes smoothly and along the way he becomes infected with a fluid that appears to be turning him into one of them! Now shunned by his own people and pursued by some weaponising mercenaries, he must rely on the “prawns” if he is to survive, or find any sort of cure. Once we’ve navigated the introductory fallow period, this picks up the pace entertainingly with a decent effort from Copley augmenting some really quite convincing visuals set in a glorified ghetto that provides as much a social commentary of how they are treated as it does an environment for the more traditional video-game elements of the story. At times it asks us whom is the more human and though set in the genre of sci-fi, asks quite poignant questions about mass migration that could apply much closer to home. Stick with it, it’s worth a watch.