District 9 Review

By: Chris Akins

Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Robert Hobbs
Year: 2009

Cloverfield brought about a new trend in filmaking. Where most movies were trying to convey realism by trying to immerse you in their world. This new genre took a different approach conveying realism by making it quite clear you were watching recorded video, but making it so the video is being recorded within this alternate world. In essence, you are viewing what a person in this world viewed as if it were on the news or a YouTube video. This new genre spawned movies like Quaruntine and Diary of the Dead, having the characters film their experiences. This was very good and all, yet none of these movies really seemed to stand out in this genre as they were all filmed the exact same way. Basically the film makers sat and thought, "What movie that's already been done would be cooler with a video camera?" Whe the genre itself was original, there was no originality in the stories being told.

However, it is a little known fact that a man named Niell Blomkamp had already been employing this technique, not in movies, but short films. He became quite famous with the release of his Halo: Landfall series and was even set to make it movie, before budgeting screwed it up. But even before that he had made a deifferent series of videos, shot like news programs, dipicting an immigrant race of aliens and the technology they brought with them. The idea was original and unusally realistic. So it's no suprise that after Halo fell through, the new director chose to make his first motion picture based on these short films.

Now we have District 9, a movie that most people have no idea what it's about. It's in the same line as such films as Cloverfield and Quarentine with the use of a character controlled camera, but this movie took a different approach by switching from what's being filmed to interviews of characters (its like the office with aliens). There were also certain parts of the film that were not being filmed within this world and actually gave it the feel of a more traditional movie while still having the realism of a news broadcast.

What makes the story so unique is the depiction of the aliens as being terrorized by the humans. They were considered a menace for their lifestyle and were treated horribly (it also didn't help that the landed in freaking Africa, at least in America they'd have alien rights activists on their side). They were then evicted from the human populated city to a new area called District 9 (no they don't explain what happened to districts 1-8). The man giving the eviction notices is our main character. He is something of a douche at first, being completely ignorant and racist against the aliens. He works for a company that deals with the aliens and studies their technology, namely their weapons. Only problem is, all their technology is biological based and can only be used by the aliens. I don't want to spoil what happens, but essentially, all hell breaks loose as the aliens try to find a way to go back home. Their weapons kick ass and they have a mech-suit that could singlehandedly take over a country. Our main character somehow becomes likeable and and epicness occurs on such a massive level, it can't be explained in this review.

This is one of the few movies to make the human race the bad guys and brings up many resemblances to apartheid and the Holocaust. The sense if realism is magnificent and the idea is unprecedented. Half way through the movie I stopped and thought to myself, "This is great freaking movie!" No matter how disgusting the aliens may seem at first, you can't help but root for them the whole way through. They even managed to make the child alien look kinda cute (in a weird insect way). There are no big names in this movie, yet everyone gives fantastic prefomances. I've been debating on whether or not to give this movie a 10, but as I thought about it, it's not exactly the Dark Knight (but as close as a documentary style film is ever gonna get).

 

9 out of 10 Nerdism Nerds.