Alien Nation

Director Neill Blomkamp.'s sci-fi film District 9 took me by total surprise...I had seen the trailers saw the online buzz building and witnessed the clever marketing campaign...I went into it thinking ok this is gonna be another film like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield

Boy was I wrong...



The film starts out using a documentary-style series of interviews, news footage and shaky hand held stuff (hence comparing it to TBW and Cloverfield) in setting up the plot.

An alien ship arrives on Earth hovering above Johannesburg, South Africa. After months without any contact, we decide to take the initiative and cut our way into the ship.

Once on board we soon discover the aliens are in a terrible state of malnourishment and sickness.

They are later assessed as apparently being all "workers", with their leadership mysteriously missing. The creatures are put in a government run camp, where overcrowding forces the militarization of the slum, known as District 9.

The control over the aliens is then contracted out and put in the care of Multi-National United (MNU), a private company not concerned in the aliens' welfare. MNU stands to receive tremendous profits if they can make the aliens' advanced weaponry work. MNU, thus far, has failed in making the alien weaponry work after discovering activation of the weapons requires alien DNA.

An MNU field operative, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), is put in charge of moving 1.8 million aliens--now called "Prawns" (a derogatory term) to a new District 10 camp located some 240 km from Johannesburg, with the help from private security forces working for MNU.

Tension between the aliens and the humans comes to a head when Wikus handles an alien device, that soon begins changing him into one of the aliens after a dark liquid gets on his face.

MNU officers take him back to headquarters to be studied and where he's forced to use the alien weaponry. Wanting to reunite with his wife (Vanessa Haywood) Wikus escapes and heads back to D-9 for refuge where he soon learns the shocking truth...



Blomkamp and Peter Jackson have made a fanboy genre film that in the tradition of say the original "Star Trek" and its spin offs is really commenting on us--In this case South Africa under apartheid rule-among other less obvious things that can be left open to debate and interpretation.

Copley is outstanding as a desperate man--Thank goodness their were no major stars in this film otherwise the movie would have not seemed as fresh...It would Big Name in an alien flick...So what?

I'm also glad that Blomkamp used subtitles throughout the entire piece for the aliens instead of having them "speak" English--nice touch...Good too was that the script by Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell kept the alien backstory to a minimum...

The effects were kept to an as needed basis and never overtake the film--which is another reason it works--rather than falling into that age old summer movie trap of effects overkill-They never took me out of the story...

There was a bit of the standard action film stuff at the end that felt contrived at times...But the last shot of the pic makes up for much of that.



District 9 is not your typical summer sci-fi film that is thankfully heavy on plot and has just enough of everything else--to satisfy fanboys.

I will never see cat food the same way again.