vinyarb

With an avalanche of hype and praise surrounding District 9 coming out of the States, I finally got to watch it yesterday. Armed with nothing but a “this is an awesome alien flick” responses from twitter reponses and initial feedback on blogs, i was totally blown away by the story, acting, execution and effects.

Helmed by first time feature film director Neill Blomkamp, and produced by Peter-LOTR-Jackson, this movie is the greatest film to have come out of 2009.

Blending a mix of drama, documentary style narrative and full-on action sequences, this film grabs you by the neck and resolves to never let go until the final frame, and then linger in your mind long after you’ve left the theatre, making you suddenly crave catfood in the middle of the night.

The story goes that in 1990, a huge alien spaceship settled directly over Johannesburg, South Africa (who says aliens love New York?) and just stalled. After a few months of inactivity, humans drilled their way in, and found a million aliens stranded in their ship, starving and in ghastly condition.

The government, not knowing what exactly to do, excavated them from their ship, and built a temporary settlement(District 9) directly underneath the mothership. 20 years on, the settlement grew to become a slum.. and now even the blacks have someone else to look down upon, giving them the derogatory term “Prawns” cos of their crustacean appearance and bottom dwelling nature.

Due to increasing pressure from the South Africans, the government is forced to perform an extraction to evict the now 1.8 million prawns to an even more secluded area (District 10) off Johannesburg. We then move the attention to Wikus van de Merwe, an office drone working for MNU (Multi National United) who’s in charge of serving the eviction notice.

While serving the eviction notices, Wikus stumbles upon a piece of alien substance and comes into contact with it, causing him to mutate and fuse with alien DNA. Now a prawn-man, he is wanted by various factions
- MNU for research purposes
- African mob for voodoo purposes

His only hope is to befriend prawns, of which he can’t even be sure if they can be trusted. What can a half-man-half-prawn do?

District 9 serves up in equal proportions a brilliant action-alien flick and a brooding social commentary about illegal immigrant and racial issues, letting you soak in awe at the story and aesthetics before mulling over the story after.

An absolute 10.

edit* When you take in this movie, and then find out it was made for a paltry 30 million.. you just have to be impressed even more.