“District 9,” which immediately earns a spot among modern sci-fi classics, started off as a “Halo” video game adaptation. When that fell through, the filmmakers decided to make something cooler.
Sure, “District 9” has violent sequences reminiscent of video games; the alien weapons disintegrate targets in a way that had my fellow moviegoers gasping even the 20th time we saw the effect. But all of that violence and action — stuff I don’t care for in its raw form — worked for me because I was so invested in the characters.
A previously unknown South African actor named Sharlto Copley plays Wikus Van De Merwe, the leader of a government task force assigned to evict aliens from their slum homes in District 9 (the xenophobia of Johannesburg humans’ has reached a breaking point after 20 years of sharing a city with the insect-looking aliens). Wikus gets this assignment because no one else wants it — the evictions are just a pretense for bringing in the military — but he naively embraces it.
It seems at first that Wikus is just a poor schmo who will end up as a sad victim in a dark comedy of a film. But “District 9,” much to its credit, doesn’t take that route; everything is played completely straight, and this allows room for real feelings rather than twisted humor. Stylistically, the closest comparison to “District 9” is the zombie film “28 Days Later” (hand-held cameras, old-school visual effects — and some new ones), but this movie has more heart and more memorable characters.
After a too-long introductory sequence, “District 9” took me on a ride where I never knew what was around the next corner. I even got to know and sympathize with an alien father and son, a remarkable achievement because visually, these aliens are in the “Independence Day” tradition, not the “E.T.” tradition. (OK, I admit that the alien kid was kind of cute.) Also, there are not one but three great villains in this movie (and none of them are aliens).
If you want, you can call “District 9” a clever parable about relations among humans of various ethnicities. As viewers, we see the subtitled translations of the aliens’ language, but most of the humans don’t grasp the nuances. Are our problems relating among our own race as simple as a miscommunication? When you boil it all down … well, maybe.
But even without the message, “District 9” will hold your attention as a thrilling tale of four really crappy — but completely fascinating — days in one guy’s life.