TV & Film Review

District 9

Feature Film | Neill Blomkamp
By Eric Schneider

District 9 morphs from a bleak slum tale into a thrilling sci-fi adventure.

Quite possibly the best film to ever result from the unraveling of a big-budget Hollywood movie, District 9 largely owes its existence to the torpedoing of a massive adaptation of the popular Halo video-game series. Undaunted, neophyte feature director Neill Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson opted to turn the former's inventive 2005 alien-apartheid short, Alive in Joburg, into a full-blown cinematic story. Sagely sticking to the show-don't-tell school of social commentary, District 9 morphs from a bleak slum tale into a thrilling sci-fi adventure as it follows the evolution of hapless South African bureaucrat Wikus van der Merwe (newcomer Sharlto Copley), the man in charge of relocating tentacle-faced extraterrestrial refugees in Johannesburg to a new settlement. Although working with plenty of familiar genre conventions (alien invasion, battle sequences, tense chases, and even some sticky gore), the film hovers high above most other sci-fi movies with its smart, engaging, and (relatively) naturalistic approach, proving that the adjectives "thoughtful" and "kick-ass" need not be mutually exclusive.

TAGS: Action, Adventure, Aliens, Apartheid, Hi-Tech Weapons, Sci-Fi, Slums, Social Commentary, South Africa, Transformations,

FACTS: Released: August 14, 2009 (TriStar Pictures); MPAA: R; Runtime: 112 Minutes; Cast: Sharlto Copley; Producer: Peter Jackson

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District 9 trailer