Once Upon a District 9
We don't like sci-fi. Of course we are fans of the Star Wars and Brazil and BSG, but we don't like aliens/robots for the sake of aliens/robots. Sci-fi as a genre really shines when it addresses social issues via metaphor, which has really been lacking in recent Hollywood films--and no, Transformers 2 is not chockful of metaphor. Lucky for us, there's alien apartheid allegory District 9 (opening in Seattle tomorrow at the Neptune and the Meridian).
The sharp debut feature from South African-born director Neill Blomkamp (a Peter Jackson-produced expansion of his 2005 six-minute short Alive in Joburg), District 9 is a film that stays with you. As with most movies, the less you know about the plot, the better, but the film makes use of faux-documentary style to give you all the pertinent background in just a few minutes: In 1982, an alien ship came to rest over Johannesburg, full of worker drones unmoored from their superiors and stranded in Earth's airspace. Upon international pressure, South Africa rescued the starving and sick ETs and moved them into refugee settlements that quickly became walled-off slums.
As the decades pass, anti-alien sentiment grows and now a multi-national corporation (MNU, with its paid mercenaries, natch) wants to resettle the nearly two million aliens (known derogatorily as "Prawns") to a new camp outside of Johannesburg proper. The action starts on the first day of the forced evictions, led by corporate rube Wikus Van De Merwe (a star-making performance by Sharlto Copley).
District 9 has the unique distinction of being a wholly original, low-budget ($30M) picture that is still heads, shoulders, and tentacles above the rest of this season's crop of action films. It's violent, gory, and fun, with a downright wicked sense of humor and actual character development. The special effects are solid without being overdone (i.e., you can actually tell who's fighting with whom), and above all, it operates from a place of moral intelligence. At its core, this is a film about man's inhumanity to man (and non-man), and the examples we know well--concentration camps, Guantanamo, xenophobia, apartheid--linger over the film like that damn alien mothership.
In a just world (and this is by no means a just world--see the shitshow going by the name "healthcare reform"), District 9 would make more than all of this summer's schlocky sub-par blockbusters combined. Oh Lord, give us faith in humanity again.
