Sitting down for District 9 Friday evening, I was given every impression that I was in for a treat.  My expectations were running fairly high since I’d seen the trailer back in June and the subject matter seemed right up my alley.  As the show started with a documentary style explanation of the premise, I could feel a sudden bulge in my pants.  As soon as our protagonist Wikus (pronounced Vickus) discovered a small cylindrical object that sprayed him in the face with an unknown liquid, I felt as if I was in mid coitus.  By about the time that a certain action sequence was taking place (pretty spoilerish so I’ll not divulge), I had basically lost all control of bodily functions and was spraying hyperbole from the tip of my penis.
That’s about how much I enjoyed D9- enough to write not one but three hyperbolic sentences akin to other online reviews.  This will easily rank in my top 5 films of the year.  I’m hoping that as time passes it will fall in line with other greats in the Science Fiction genre.  Even with my expectations for the film pretty high, I still wasn’t expecting this level of story, social commentary, special effects, and action/suspense.
District 9 presents us with a scenario where an alien spacecraft shows up in Johannesburg, South Africa around 1982.  It just seems to hover there until humans fly to it and drill through the outer wall to discover close to a million insect-like, bi-pedal creatures dying from starvation.  The government quickly sections off part of the slums to give the Prawns, as they are called, their own living space.  But as it is with such transactions, the humans are hoping to learn about the Prawn technology, primarily their weaponry, in exchange for providing them a new home.  To go any further regarding plot would ruin your viewing experience.  Suffice to say, lots of shit happens and it’s all pretty bad ass.
Probably more surprising than anything I came to expect, this film has some of the better action scenes I’ve seen in recent memory.  They easily trump Terminator Salvation or Transformers 2, making their respective set pieces slow and without any sense of danger for the characters.  The difference seems to be the innovation that director Neil Blomkamp brought to the table.  I firmly believe that more thought went into just the alien weaponry of D9 than did the entirety of either of those other two Sci-Fi extravaganzas.  To think that the film was made for $30 million and blows away two films made for eight times that just makes my head spin.  And is this the first R-rated action film released this summer or something?  Fuck me it’s great to see heads and bodies explode for a change.
Then there’s the Prawns themselves.  For the most part they look photorealistic and their interactions with the humans are unlike any human-alien relationship we’ve really seen in film; at least for films based on Earth.  The Prawns don’t come across as too dangerous.  They’re portrayed more like the homeless that typically propagate in the South African slums- scavenging for food and  pushing around wheeled baskets full of any resource they can dig out of the large bushels of garbage stacked next to their shacks.  The government in South Africa seems to have just brushed them under the rug, basically labeling them as non-essential.  Given that a new lower class has emerged, the Nigerians are now taking advantage of this alien race as opposed to low class humans.  I could talk about this shit for hours as you can see, but it’s really great that the Prawns aren’t just the backdrop for spectacle more so than they are an integral part of the environment this film covers.
I already feel like this review is running long and I have so much more I could discuss.  Not only is that a sign of a good Sci-Fi entry, it’s just a sign of a good movie in general.  District 9 is an excellent flick and I’m hoping it will find a huge audience when it releases on Friday.  If you have the opportunity, check it out.  I give it a very strong recommendation and know that I’ll be discussing it further down the road here on The Breach.
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