District 9 is amazing. Simply brilliant. I’m not going to wax poetic about it but its quiet simply the best movie I have seen this summer. Transformers 2 was amazingly entertaining and technologically brillaint too. It lacked depth. District 9 gives you depth in spades. The movie centers around a race of aliens whose ship mysteriously stops over Johannesburg, South Africa. The aliens are “rescued” when the ship is cut open and they are discovered starving. Acting out of humanitarian good will, the “prawns” so-called due to their lobster/mantis appearance are forced to live in the squalid conditions of District 9. Winkus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is a bureaucrat at MNU (this movies evil corporation) tasked with evicting the prawns from District 9 and moving them into District 10 (a lot smaller and farther away from people).
From there the movie spins into an epic of action and sci-fi awesomeness. Winkus must breakout of an MNU lab 4 stories underground and then break back in to retrieve a mysterious fluid. But he does it with a little help. A prawn who goes by the name Christopher Johnson needs the fluid to save his people. So the two of them use kick ass alien weapons to break into MNU and get the fluid back.
The action filled finale features Winkus in a Mech Warrior suit kicking MNU’s ass. The greatest part of this movie is its story. it’s the opposite of every alien movie ever made, save for “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. District 9 shows the brutality of the human condition and the ability of one man to overcome human nature and help another race. Director Neill Blomkamp is expertly able to engender compassion for the prawns, that they quickly become objects of pity. This ability is truly remarkable and lost art among directors today. District 9 is powerful and moving but also filled with action and amazing graphics. This isn’t like some alien movies (Signs) where you rarely see the aliens themselves, and when you do, they’re horribly rendered. No, the CGI in District 9 is top notch and well done.
Without qualification I recommend this movie. It definitely is the best movie I’ve seen this year and has possibly cracked my top 10 movies of all time, but I’ll have to see it again to be sure.
