In his feature film debut, writer-director Neil Blomkamp has done something remarkable with District 9, a bloody good, viscerally jarring, low budget sci-fi flick that uses human-alien interaction as a depressingly apt analogue for apartheid. Stuff blows up, sure, but it's emotionally unsettling as well, a rare feat for a summertime science fiction release.
It's been 20 years since an alien ship came to rest over Johannesburg, S.A. when District 9 begins, and in those two decades the beings retrieved from that ship have been forced to live in a walled-off slum on the outskirts of the city. Through a combination of faux news footage, documentary clips and security camera video, we learn that these aliens, saddled with the derogatory nickname "prawns" because of their crustacean-like appearance, were the worker drones of their species. With the more intelligent upper class who ran the ship now dead and their ship broken, they've little recourse but to scrabble through piles of garbage and trade what small items of alien tech they have for luxuries like cat food, which they adore.
Informed more than a little by Alien Nation, E.T. and other aliens-in-our-midst flicks, the movie still feels utterly fresh thanks to Blomkamp's verite-esque style, which feeds us the basic premise at a fast clip in the movie's first 15 minutes. Central to the story is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a cheerful milquetoast of a middle-rank bureaucrat who gets the job of overseeing the eviction and transfer of District 9's alien residents to an even worse interment camp, further out of town.
Wikus leads a camera crew through the district, making us complicit with the military's jack-boot tactics and introducing us to the squalor in which the prawns live, until he comes into contact with a viscous black substance that has a rather unfortunate effect on his DNA. What follows is an adventure with an unlikeable hero -- imagine a South African version of Steve Carell on The Office -- who makes us root for him despite his craven cowardice and xemophobia.
Despite having a budget of just $30 million, District 9 looks marvelous, especially the the stunning work integrating the all-CGI prawns; most were performed by one actor, wearing a motion-capture suit and then digitally altered in a similar fashion to Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And one extended scene in which Wikum wears an enormous, robotic alien battle suit puts anything seen in the Transformers films to shame.
There's a grimy elegance to District 9, but it's also full of disturbingly icky images, so those with tender sensibilities should be forewarned. It's also an exciting debut by a fresh new talent, and a happy alternative to the gigantic, yet unsatisfying, blockbusters that have marked the sumnmer so far.