One of the most difficult feats for any filmmaker in the science fiction or fantasy genre is to create a world or situation or something that makes an audience care. I'm not just talking about being entertained for a couple of hours, I'm talking about invoking an emotional response from the things we are shown. Even harder is for that to happen in an action setting. However after four Academy Award winning fantasy films, Peter Jackson is a name in which inspires confidence with such a challenge and writer-director Neil Blomkamp has made one of the best directorial debuts since Zack Snyder.
"District 9" is a science fiction film that has brains, balls and everything in between. It's an amazing and visionary film that does live up to all it's hype and yet delivers something much less identified from it's trailers. This film is about how we as human beings would REALLY act towards an alien life form coming to our planet and staying here and they were particularly hostile. There would be prejudice, some violence everything that we have would spill over into there new lives. Then the government steps in and finds away to "legally" make them do what they want done. The first half of the film is set like a documentary with interviews from South African professors, scientists, citizens and people in mid-level positions in Alien Affairs offices that new our main character Wikus Van De Merwe played by a very unknown actor who is making his own debut here Sharlto Copley. Sharlto should be getting a lot more work after this, his shinning and enduring performance is moving, strong and truthful. Here is a real guy who's life is slowly coming to an end due to an accident in D-9 with a mysterious chemical. His father in law is also his boss at MNU and someone not to be trusted.
When we break out of the documentary format we are rewarded to sequence after sequence of strong action that's among some of the best CGI and action staging I've seen this year. Blomkamp got his start as an effects artist which would explain why the graphics on everything are so good. Beyond that some of these sequences are mind blowingly great. The final act is something out of science fiction dreams. "District 9" really delivers everything. So then why wouldn't someone like it? Well the same reason that someone would hate 'Blade Runner' because they don't understand why Roy Batty and the others need to live. The same reason someone would hate 'Children of Men' because what does one child mean in that kind of society. The point is that some people just can't or won't get it. Theres an emotional ping that they might not get or like and they want something more black and white. I love '300', but it's very black and white, a meathead express of a movie. "District 9" isn't that. In fact I've been trying since friday morning to compare it to one other film and the closest I've come to is this... if you took the action of 'Aliens' & 'Black Hawk Down' and some of the ideas of 'The Abyss' you might scratch the surface of 'District 9'.
I cannot stress how much you should see this film and I cannot tell you really how much I liked it. It's crazy thinking that I may love this film more than Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglorious Basterds' out next weekend (and I'm damned excited to finally see it). And it's crazy that here is a science fiction epic, made for only thirty million dollars is my favorite film of this year (thus far) and one of the top three sci-fi films I've seen in the 2000's.
"District 9" **** out of ****
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