Had Steven Spielberg or George Lucas watched the movie ‘District 9', both of them could either have been cheered up or discouraged, since after viewing the film they may find there is no lack of qualified predecessors to direct ‘alien' movies. They may have sensed that it is time to hand over the reins to young directors.
An exceptional find among the dross of ordinary ‘alien' movies in recent years, District 9 is the movie I'm reviewing this week.
Twenty years ago, a gigantic UFO stopped over the city of Johannesburg, carrying malnourished and sick aliens. Unable to operate the ship any more, the extraterrestrial clan was allowed to inhabit a slum in the city called District 9.
However, two decades of reproduction leads to a population boom of the race and unavoidably triggers fighting between humans and aliens.
Employed by a munitions company MNU, Wikus van der Merwe is assigned the task of evicting the aliens to a more remote area. He is accidentally exposed to an alien liquid during the operation and begins to mutate into the species from outer space.
The style of the movie very much resembles a documentary with interviews and TV footage. Actually, this is the films charm. During some scenes, I was even under the delusion that such chaos might have occurred on Earth, or could happen in real life.
At the same time, the movie manages to surprise you with an original screenplay and leaves you with a lot to ponder. As many of us have been brainwashed by Hollywood, you can only expect a ‘humans vs. aliens' movie to be full of action and thin on story. But this cinematic treat elevates into the introspection of human sin and wrongdoing: if the inhabitants in the slum were not aliens but real people, are we sure the same thing could not happen today? Isn't it a reflection of what the powerful do to the disadvantaged in the world today? As my doubts mounted, I even began to wonder which side I should root for during the screening.
On my 1-to-10 scale, I give this movie an eight.
