District 9 movie trailor

ET go home – and take your twinkling cathedral of a mothership with you. That's the unfortunate attitude of embattled homo sapiens in this entertaining, technically superb if faintly unsatisfying futuristic thriller from the first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp; the producer is that Jedi master of creature features, Peter Jackson. The DNA of action-sci-fi merges with a sleek exo-skeleton of satire to create a smart dystopian movie, excitingly shot in a docu-realist style with some stunningly real CGI work. It's a film in the tradition of Planet of the Apes and Godzilla, with hints of serious pictures such as Children of Men and the less serious Cloverfield. And despite all the ultra-hi-tech sheen, the spirit of Ed Wood Jr lives cheerfully on in some of the prosthetic work.

District 9 movie images

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District 9 movie cast and crew

Directed by
Neill Blomkamp        




Sharlto Copley   
   
Jason Cope   

Nathalie Boltt   
   

Sylvaine Strike   
   
Elizabeth Mkandawie   

John Sumner   
   
William Allen Young   
   
Greg Melvill-Smith   

Nick Blake   
   
Morena Busa Sesatsa   
   
Themba Nkosi   

District 9 movie review

For the second time this summer, a young, brand-new director has emerged from out of nowhere to present a vision of where sci-fi can go from here. It first happened with Moon, the elegant and tightly sealed thinkpiece from Duncan Jones that operated far more with the head than with the heart. Now, from the complete opposite side, comes District 9, Neill Blomkamp's visceral and thumping debut that, even if it doesn't have quite all its ideas in order, presents a fascinating and effective vision of the future, and of humanity itself.

Taking an obvious metaphor for apartheid as a mere jumping-off point, District 9 is set in Blomkamp's hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa, where 20 years earlier a spaceship appeared above the city and mysteriously stopped. Humans "rescued" the starving alien creatures inside it and rounded them up in an area called District 9, which quickly morphed into a slum where Nigerian gangsters prey off the aliens, given the derogatory but accurate nickname "prawns." The time has finally come for the government agency/weapons manufacturer MNU to relocate District 9 further from the city, and put in charge of the operation is bureaucratic dweeb Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a guy who married the boss's daughter and has spent the rest of his life happily pushing pencils in a larger-than-average cubicle.

As he serves eviction notices to the prawns who live in the assorted shacks, Wikus takes delight in firebombing alien eggs and wielding his authority like a particularly obnoxious weapon. But when he comes afoul of a mysterious substance cooked up by an alien named, for some reason, Christopher Johnson, Wikus almost immediately begins a transformation into the world's first human-alien hybrid. After the government initially tries to slice him up for research and weapons development, Wikus escapes and takes refuge in the only hiding place he has left: District 9.

What follows is a fairly traditional search-and-rescue action movie plot, as Wikus and Christopher team up to recover the substance that transformed Wikus to begin with, for reasons better left discovered on your own. With a vivid imagination and a taste for gore, Blomkamp dreams up a whole arsenal of alien weapons that fry, blast and dismember human beings in all kinds of awesome ways. The film uses faux-documentary footage, news reports and security cameras combined with traditional photography to create its own kind of realism, giving the viewer the distinct feeling they are on the lam right next to Wikus. Blomkamp's handheld style is effective and never jerky; you always know where you are in the scene, which is especially critical when seeing more than one alien creature that looks essentially the same as the next one.

Created entirely out of CGI, the aliens are a true marvel, as Christopher and his little son are as real a character as E.T. or Wikus himself. It's a shame, then, that as we get to know the aliens and see subtitles for their language, that we don't learn more about them. Why did they show up here? Just how smart are they? What's their plan for getting back? It all gets shoved to the foreground in favor of Wikus' admittedly more interesting story, while a more experienced director might have been able to handle both stories. It technically doesn't matter that District 9 was so cheap, about $30 million, but it indicates an economy of both filmmaking and storytelling that, more than anything, makes Blomkamp a filmmaker worth watching. Even when it doesn't have all its ideas or the logic of its world in place, the narrative of Wikus' transformation from government stooge to freedom fighter is flawless. It helps that Copley turns in a stunning debut performance, ferocious and feral and constantly wonderful to watch.

District 9 isn't exactly sci-fi for the ages-- it's too unclear on what it has to say, and its story ranges too far within the meticulously created world without providing any real insight. But it's impressive not just as a debut, but as a new example of how to use original sci-fi as a mirror to our own world, and without $200 million budgets and space battles or even hobbits. Peter Jackson took the money he made making a faithful and beautiful adaptation, and has used it to fund something truly, remarkably original.

District 9 movie overview

ET go home – and take your twinkling cathedral of a mothership with you. That's the unfortunate attitude of embattled homo sapiens in this entertaining, technically superb if faintly unsatisfying futuristic thriller from the first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp; the producer is that Jedi master of creature features, Peter Jackson. The DNA of action-sci-fi merges with a sleek exo-skeleton of satire to create a smart dystopian movie, excitingly shot in a docu-realist style with some stunningly real CGI work. It's a film in the tradition of Planet of the Apes and Godzilla, with hints of serious pictures such as Children of Men and the less serious Cloverfield. And despite all the ultra-hi-tech sheen, the spirit of Ed Wood Jr lives cheerfully on in some of the prosthetic work.

Not too far into the future, a huge, lumbering spaceship shows up over planet Earth and stops there in the sky, hovering over a 21st-century modern city, and the digital image of that great rusty hulk up in the smoggy heat haze is so gobsmackingly real I suspected Blomkamp must have somehow built a spaceship and flown it up there himself. Terrified and suspicious, our earthling military finally storm the ship to find thousands of crustacean-like alien refugees cowering in the dark, metallic hold, evidently rejected by their home planet. Progressive liberal politicians have no choice but to allow these poor creatures out and let them live in the outskirts of the city, which they turn into a no-go crime slum called District 9.

They are nicknamed "prawns", hated by civilians, police and army. Eventually a smarmy civil servant, played by Sharlto Copley, is tasked with overseeing the mass eviction of the rabid untermensch-aliens, backed by the privatised corporate security militia, and moving them into a huge internment camp outside of town. But a fragment of something appears to have fallen from the still-hovering mothership into this unpoliced swamp, matériel that will allow the aliens secretly to rebuild and extend a cache of biotech weaponry, designed to work only in contact with alien flesh. Clearly, some of these prawns are planning something.

The city in question is the director's hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa, a location that simultaneously enables and renders very self-conscious the movie's satirical dimension. Only a few years after apartheid was abolished in South Africa … well, there they go, you see, bringing it in all over again, criminalising and dehumanising an entire populace with a Soweto-like township and petty discrimination in public parks, restaurants, everything. But just as no one in EastEnders watches EastEnders, no one notices the apartheid parallel here and gasps: "Hah ah-roneeck!"

This overt satire effectively encourages the audience to ask questions the movie is uninterested in answering. Do the aliens unite white and black earthlings in an ironic common front of caste-paranoia? And given that the ANC is in charge in 2009 and that its importance could reasonably be expected to last into the future being imagined here, are we to see black politicians prosecuting this grotesque new discrimination? Not exactly. In this movie, evil whites are in charge, albeit as officers of the all-powerful corporation – and such corporations are often introduced in dystopian sci-fi in a way that sneakily permits the film-maker to avoid getting tangled up in recognisable political realities.

I wasn't sure if Blomkamp is saying that white racism will always recur, or if he is just falling back on stereotypes. Earthling race-politics do not appear to exist, and the only important black character in this movie is a Nigerian crime-lord with cannibal tendencies: yet the whites, presiding over their alien experimentation labs, are as bad, or worse. Finally, I felt the movie's satirical status was a little too easily assumed: basically it's a third-person-shooter-game-cum-action-fantasy, and there are also some pretty heavy-handed plot inventions intended to breed sequels.

But what an action picture it is: the digital effects are so great they make it look like a documentary from hell, and Copley's performance as Wikus van de Merwe, the functionary who must supervise the slum clearance, is tremendous – particularly when he gets up close and personal with the alien prawns, a fatal transgression that is to trigger horrible changes in his own body.  The sequences showing his impossibly dangerous sortie into the slum, which he carries off with a bizarre nonchalance indicating that he simply doesn't understand the danger, are hugely tense with some grisly moments. Wikus opens up a shack to show how the alien tenants have killed a cow and are using the blood draining from its carcase to nourish the females' recently laid eggs. The heat and discomfort and fear of these scenes are outstandingly contrived, and Wikus's relationship with the alien insurgent, morphing from suspicion into something like brotherly love, is an effect that owes nothing to CGI.