Movie Review: District 9

District 9
Christa and I went down to the 29th St Theater to see District 9 on it’s opening day. As an aside, we stopped over at the Italian restaurant across the street for dinner first and had a lovely time. The bottle of wine certainly didn’t hurt anything! We headed down to the movie waaaay ahead of time, but the dinner took a really long time and we actually only got to the movie a few minutes early. Apparently the movie was sold out and we ended up sitting right down in the front, about 4 rows back. It was one of those seats where you have to crane your head up to try and see the screen.

The movie was a pseudo-documentary style with lots of fast action and close in shots. I actually felt a little ill in the very beginning. I think it’s because I was sitting so close and had a hard time focusing on what was going on on the screen. There was lots of movement and that’s not the easiest to follow with the documentary style filming. But I got over it pretty quickly and was able to settle down into the movie.

In case you don’t know, the basic premise for the movie is that aliens have come to Earth and their ship settled right over Johannesburg. The aliens were put into a holding camp which turned into a slum (District 9) and the movie is about an attempt to relocate them. All of this is revealed in the trailers or the first few minutes of the movie. The movie didn’t unfold the way I expected it would. This isn’t really surprising since not a lot was known about the movie, but it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. In some sense, it’s more of a characters piece about one of the main aid workers. I think I was looking for more of a movie about the aliens. But (and I think this was actually a strength of the movie) you could’ve swapped out the aliens with any minority group around the world, and everything would’ve held true. This is really what the movie was about I believe. It wasn’t about aliens per se, rather they were just the visual representation of various other groups throughout history. Viewed through that way, it’s a pretty powerful movie.

I may make it sound like slow plodding movie, but that wasn’t the case at all. There are lots of actions sequences and special effects throughout. I saw Peter Jackson (the producer) state that even though it was a ‘low budget’ film, made for only $30 million, the director was able to get in all the effects they wanted. The aliens look spectacularly believable which I guess is my way of saying the makeup was remarkable. There were lots of rockets, guns, alien weapons, everything you’d want in an alien invasion movie. So while it’s definitely a character driven story, there is no lack of action to keep things moving along.

My only complaint is the lack of any real answers. The movie basically starts with the aliens having been in District 9 for 20 years. We don’t know how they got here or why they’re here. None of this is ever explained. Any while in some sense it doesn’t matter, it made me just scratch my head on the way out. District 9 wasn’t the movie I thought it was going to be, but I still really enjoyed it. I think it’s got a pretty powerful message wrapped up in an alien shell. There were some things that I just didn’t agree with though, one of the main ones being the lack of any answers coming out of the movie. I liked it, but felt it could’ve been a bit better. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys ‘sciencey’ movies. I give it a 3.5/5.

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