BY COLIN ENQUIST

Based entirely in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, alien creatures live in the slums of District 9. Nobody knows why they came to our world. MNU (Multi-National United), the massive corporation vying for the alien technology has been given the task of relocating the lobster like creatures 200 miles away from District 9. The humans living in and around Johannesburg do not like the aliens, dubbing the aliens with a new racial term, “prawns”. The film has an eerie parallel to the 1966 forced removal of 60, 000 people in District Six (which was a residential are in Cape Town, South Africa) to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres away. When an MNU worker Wikus van der Merwe (Shartlo Copley) comes into contact with a biological alien liquid he starts to transform. Instantly he becomes of enormous value to MNU because the alien weaponry they are trying to duplicate only works with an alien (specifically there DNA) behind the trigger. Now van der Merwe is on the run and hides in the place he hopes MNU will look last, District 9.
Blomkamp opens the film in a documentary style and hammers us with loads of information. Our entire understanding of what the aliens can and can not do is told through the first 30 minutes. Using the hand held camera is always a stroke of genius or fails miserably. Sadly District 9 has a little too much of it. Although it works extremely well at the beginning of the film it tends to be overused later where the camera shakes so much that it is dreadfully tough to follow. The shaky camera is not helped by the quick cuts Blomkamp utilizes throughout the entirety of the film.

Act one and two are utterly fascinating, probably the most original film about aliens in many years. Sadly act three turns into your generic action film. I do give Blomkamp credit though. A fully expected a car(s) to explode for no reason when tossed in the air, coming down with a load crash, but it never came. I applaud him for not reverting to pointless explosions to grab a viewer’s attention.
The ingenuity the film had going for the first two acts had me thinking I was watching something truly special. A lacklustre finish though destroyed the films chances of being in the upper echelon of science fiction films. I do hope we get a sequel but this movie completely answers the questions they set out to ask. If Blomkamp and Jackson return for another go around, then so will I.
3.5 out of 5
good stuff...i should prolly see it, eh?
ReplyDeleteYa, check it out. Don't wait for Netflix.
ReplyDelete