I pretty much had to drag my wife to the cinema for this one after reading rave reviews of it on QT3. Peter Jackson’s involvement in the film, after what he gave us in the King Kong remake, was not a glowing endorsement to us. Luckily for me, both of us enjoyed it thoroughly and I recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys action films that don’t try to treat their audience as if they were 5 year-olds. The rest of this post will be chockful of spoilers so if you haven’t watched it yet, please go away and come back later.

District 9 opens using a mockumentary format that combined with its South African setting, draws us into a realistic depiction of a world in which a gigantic alien ship has mysteriously appeared overnight. However, the aliens the ship disgorges turn out to be neither enlightened beings here to lead humanity to a brighter future nor nefarious conquerors bent on world domination. Instead they are nothing more than starving and desperate refugees. Not since Alien Nation has a major film treated the issue of first contact with extraterrestrials in as mature and serious a manner.

First-time director Neill Blomkamp uses the actual shanty towns of Johannesburg to great effect. No doubt their relatively low budget forced them to get creative with what they had, but it also helps to ground the film in solid reality. Instead of the sanitized, stage managed look that many big budget films have, District 9 looks like it was shot in real locations, not movie sets, and with real people, not glamorous stars. Even the film stock they use looks grainy and worn, rather than glossy and pixel perfect.

The story itself is an obvious allegory of the apartheid era in South Africa. Particularly notable in the film is how skillfully the lead  character of Wikus van de Merwe is written and portrayed. He obviously thinks of himself as a fundamentally good person doing an essentially noble but sometimes unpleasant job. Yet everything in his demeanor and actions reveal his condescension towards the aliens and his utter incapability to even imagine that they can be persons in their own right. It’s as vivid a representation of the white man’s burden as any captured on film. This makes the pivotal point when he realizes that these beings are indeed people particularly satisfying to watch. Contrast the early scenes when he knocks on the aliens’ door as a perfunctory nod to established protocol and the later one when he lightly taps on Christopher Johnson’s (great anachronistic choice of name here) door knowing that he is intruding upon a father and son moment.

All the more reason to be disappointed that despite the excellent world-building and the intelligent establishment of interesting characters, the film fails to fully capitalize on these themes and rather abruptly transforms into more traditional action adventure fare. Even the documentary format and hand-held camera usage are abandoned to fully embrace the transition to wide-eyed action on the big screen. To be fair to District 9, it’s very, very good action and as befits the director who was originally supposed to direct a film based on the Halo videogame franchise and was only offered this film as a consolation prize, is crammed full of videogaming fanservice.

Off the top of my head, there’s the gravity gun from the Half-Life series, energy weapons and vehicles vaguely reminiscent of Halo and it even manages to get a mech in. It’s all done cleverly and appeals to the gamer in me much more than the lame trailer for the Gamer movie starring Gerald Butler that was shown in the cinema where I watched District 9. Most importantly, the use of videogaming tropes never descends into camp and the action is tense and exciting throughout.

One last thing that impressed me particularly is how the film manages to resist trying to explain things too much. Why is Christopher Johnson so smart when the rest of his kind seem so aimless and animal-like? Why did the ship come to Earth in the first place and why is their condition so pathetic when they obviously have such awesome technology? The film shows us just enough for us to imagine plausible scenarios on our own while avoiding specific explanations that detract from the overall flow of the story and invite over-analyzing.  For example, perhaps their species is divided into castes with different abilities and most of the aliens are only semi-intelligent workers.

Overall District 9 is to my mind one of the freshest, most original science-fiction films of recent memory. And if it fails to live up to its full potential, it ought to be remembered that Neill Blomkamp is only 29 years old and his skills have plenty of time to mature. This is one up and coming director that I for one am going to watch out for.