District 9

"District 9" had to be one of the best advertised films last year. The movie was shot in South Africa on a limited budget and had no stars.The film was produced by Peter Jackson, the Director of the "Lord of the Rings" and was advertised in commercials with an enormous dormant spaceship hovering over Johanesburg South Africa. The aliens in the movie were wisely kept out of the trailer and the commercials because that would have taken away from the curiosity audiences had before seeing it. All this resulted in the movie making $37 million its opening weekend. Here is a case where the advertisement of a movie is better than the movie itself.
"District 9" is not altogether a bad movie and cannot be faulted for its ambition. It wants to be a science fiction thriller mixed with social commentary on xenophobia , segregation and corporate greed. The first part of this movie is the best part. Director Neil Blomkamp uses a documentary style of filmaking showing fictional interviews, news footage, and video cameras to show audiences a alien spaceship which reports say was separted from its command module and dropped to earth. The aliens which (or extraterrestrials) look like a cross between a giant cockroach and a praying mantis are granted assylum on earth but trouble shortly ensues. Since some of the aliens engage in criminal activity like derailing trains the entire alien population, now derogatorily referred to as prawns, are relocated and forced to live in a government camp called District 9. The camp is a slum which is monitored by the police and where the prawns deal their highly sofisticated and explosive weapons that humans cannot operate to a Nigerian warlord. These conditions are intended to be compared with the conditions blacks lived in under South Africa's apartheid government and Blomkamp does a good job in showing these conditions without being heavy handed or preaching to the audience. When the government decides the aliens need to be relocated to District 10 which is a camp outside of Johanesburg, a Multinational Unit (MNU) using a private military corporation enforces the relocation. Leading the relocation is a bueracrat named Wikus Van De Merwe (well played by Sharlto Copley) and during the relocation we see him and his team confiscate alien weapons and abort alien eggs. During a raid of a prawn the military calls Johnson, Van De Merwe comes across a canister containing a fluid that he is accidentally sprayed with. We find out later that liquid that will both make Van De Merwe mutate into a prawn and will be the catalyst needed to reactivate the dormant mothership. As Van De Merwe's mutation continues he develops an alien arm and MNU discovers that he can utilize the alien weapons and wants to use him as a test experiment that they will soon discard. Van De Merwe escapes and goes back to District 9 and this is where the movie loses its way. Van De Merwe allies himself with the prawn named Johnson who has agreed to reverse effects of the liquid as long as he can use the liquid to reactivate his ship and return home. The film's pace meanders at this point and lacks the intense pace needed for a thriller. It felt like Blomkamp was trying to combine the drama of a man mutating into something not human like in David Croneburg's "The Fly" with the heavy high tech action of Paul Verhoven's "Robocop" and missed on both marks. As the film closes to it's end instead of being on the edge of your seat, you may discover parts of the movie that don't make much sense, for example, since the prawns had these superior weapons that humans cannot operate,why would they deal them to a Nigerian warlord and not use them to put up some resistance against the South African Military.
"District 9" is a good looking action film with a social conscience that lacks the proper execution needed to be an effective thriller.