The Quern

Alien Nation meets… Cry Freedom?

District 9

Rating:  5/5

It says something when after a movie is over, the entire theater sits in silence for a minute, and the silence holds as the audience files out.  This movie was very powerful; it took hours for the impact of it to fade to a point where I wasn’t walking around with a stunned expression on my face.  If anyone needed more proof that Peter Jackson knows how to make gripping genre films, District 9 is it.

You get the backstory of the film fairly quickly, at the beginning, so I’ll give you a bit of it here.  If you don’t want any spoilers at all, even mild backstory ones, skip down to the final section.

***

In a near future that looks much like today, a gargantuan alien ship has arrived at the Earth and hovered to a stop over Johannesburg, South Africa.  After three weeks of inactivity, humans cut their way onto the ship and discover around a million starving, diseased aliens, quickly dubbed ‘prawns’.  They are airlifted to temporary lodgings just outside of the city, where it’s quickly found that humans and prawn don’t mix well.

The humans resent and fear the influx of a huge number of aliens, whose bizarre and often violent reaction to the squalor they find themselves in doesn’t help their public image any.  It isn’t long before apartheid-style laws are implemented to separate the prawn from the human community, culminating in their eventual lockdown into the eponymous District 9, a fenced shantytown surrounded by security guards and heavy weapon emplacements.

***

The movie is filmed documentary-style, with plenty of shaky-cam scenes.  Normally I don’t like this, but it’s not excessive here and lends to the immediacy of the film.  There are no name actors in the production — all of the actors seem to be South African nationals, and they do a great job.  The writing and plotting is very tight; the movie clocks in at under 2 hours, a rarity these days, and leads you through a very intense, gripping ride without ever leaving you feeling completely overwhelmed.

There are some negative issues with the movie.  There are a few too many convenient coincidences, and a good deal of suspension of disbelief is required with respect to aspects of the alien technology.  While the movie does a fantastic job with the social ramifications of the presence of the aliens, it doesn’t always make sense from a scientific perspective, and there are a number of ways in which the reactions of human society both at the international level and the individual level don’t make a great deal of sense.  The aliens are not immune to this either, even granting that they are alien and that we don’t know even 10% of their full story.

Most of these (fairly minor) shortcomings are easily overcome with a good dose of willing suspension of disbelief, and the compelling power of this movie will make you want to take it completely at face value.  It’s very worth seeing, and I hope that this heralds the start of a great career for writer/director Neill Blomkamp.  If you like science fiction at all and can handle an intense film with moderate gore and profanity, District 9 is a must-see.