Review: 'District 9' Will Blow You Away

Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes you remember that summer flicks don’t have to be brainless to kick your ass. Last year it was The Dark Knight, this year, it’s the blood-splattered alien movie District 9, which was produced by Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings). It’s action-packed, smart and original—an instant classic. If there’s any justice in the world, it will get an audience as big as G.I. Joe’s.

The premise is fresh: aliens who are forced to live in a slum for years after their ship breaks down just above Johannesburg, South Africa, (they’re not invaders, just stranded) get help from an unexpected source—a worker for an evil company who is exposed to their biotechnology with shocking results. Wikus (pronounced Vikus, played by Sharlto Copley) is a cog in the machine—a bubbly cubicle dork whose father-in-law heads the multinational security company (think Halliburton) charged with keeping order in District 9, as the alien slum is called. But the company, MNU, is actually more interested in finding alien powerful weapons and figuring out how to make them work so they can sell them to the highest bidder (the guns have been mysteriously inoperable since shortly after the alien landing). When pop-in-law charges him with heading up an effort to move the aliens to a concentration camp and Wikus accidentally gains the power to use the weapons while inside District 9, he becomes invaluable to the company, at a very high personal price—one which he chooses not to pay by running away and setting off a bullet-ridden manhunt.

If my description sounds a bit vague, that’s on purpose. It would be unforgivable to give away too much here. This is the kind of story that should be discovered in the theater, as it happens. The flick itself is set up for maximum suspense: it begins as a sort of documentary being put together after the disappearance of Wikus, with the first 20 or so minutes dedicated to showing “footage” of him, interviews with his wife and family and experts who analyze Wikus’ motivation and give a quick overview of the aliens’ history.

Suffice it to say that I love what this movie has to say about what really makes you human, how easy it is to dehumanize and be dehumanized, and how difficult it is to keep any of that from happening and maintain your integrity. It’s no coincidence that this story is set and came out of South Africa (where both first-time director Neill Blomkamp and Copley are from), land of apartheid and refugee camps.

Everything about this movie feels at new. From the African setting, complete with strange accents and names to the masterful way that the movie blends state-of-the-art CGI into an aggressively gritty cinematography, using technology in service of the story, not for its own sake.

But the movie will also seem oddly, rewardingly familiar: in look and innovative spirit, it’s more in tune with vintage flicks that paired inventiveness of story and technique with pure heart—watching the movie, I thought of early Spielberg like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and got a little misty eyed when heads exploded like tomato puree, like in Scanners. I raised a hopeful little victory fist for the return of summer movies that offer more than a visual assault to distract you from a hollow center.—Damarys Ocaña

SITV.COM: Grade: A