I saw District 9 this morning. Wow. If you haven’t seen the trailer, you should check it out now because – even just the trailer – is one of the coolest trailers I’ve ever seen.
The basic premise is that 20 years ago, aliens came to Earth. Not to Paris. Not Manhatten. Not the Golden Gate Bridge. Nah, their mothership stopped over Johannesburg, South Africa. And the aliens weren’t here to invade or even to enhance interplanetary communication. They were malnourished and starving – the poorest of the supposed alien race, on a ship scavenging for resources on different planets around the galaxy. And they just happened to run out of fuel over Earth.
As the movie’s main plot starts, all of this is old news. 20 years have gone by, and almost 2 million aliens are living in District 9, right outside of Johannesburg in what over time became a slum. Then, when the awesome-effect of the aliens wore off, people got tired of them scavenging their food and wanted them out – so a private security company, MNU, is hired to move them to a new location away from everyone. Our main character then needs to enter District 9 to get them to sign eviction notices. And then some crazy stuff happens which is the rest of the movie – I’m not going to explain it here because it’s nice to not know exactly how the movie is going to play out.
What’s so interesting about District 9 is it’s real-world approach to such a traditional storyline. The movie is shot like a documentary for much of the time, inter-cutting interviews with scholarly-looking experts who act as sort of narrators on the events of the movie. There is also a lot of hand-held and security camera footage. Over the course of the movie, it shifts to a more narrative-style storyline, but the real-world grunginess of the documentary parts still shines through.
Even if District 9 isn’t a perfect movie, it is such a unique film that it’s differences from, say, Transformers and Independence Day, make it well worth the ride. At times it was bloodily funny and also incredibly sad. Because we see the alien scenario in such a different context than usual, it feels fresh, new, and exciting. It feels like the crisis is really happening in our world. Or at least the world that we see on CNN.
And as usual… 87% on Rotten Tomatoes – certainly not bad at all
