Because of its viral advertising campaign, I hardly knew anything about District 9 going into the theater. The movie is shot in a way similar to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, and the creators and marketing directors decided to promote the film in a way similar to those other films. There were posters similar to the one above that give no indication about the story or plot, and many of the original trailers give away very little of the movie, even using footage that was not included in the final cut. I think almost every movie would benefit from less knowledge going in, but I really think it helped District 9. That being said if you think you might want to see this movie (and I really think you should) you should stop reading here and go into the theater a blank slate.
So for the rest of you, either people who've seen the movie or those who like spoilers, I won't really go too much into a plot summary. I actually missed the first 10 minutes of this movie (blame Julie & Julia) but I really didn't feel like I missed that much. From my research, the only thing the first 10 minutes establishes is the basic concept, which I already knew. An alien spaceship makes its way to Earth but then stalls over South Africa. No contact with the aliens is made until humans cut open the ship and find roughly a million aliens living in squalor and starvation. Eventually the aliens are set up in resettlement camps and the rest of the movie takes place 20 years in the future.
Although some youngsters might not pick up on this, the movie is a thinly veiled commentary on the apartheid situation in South Africa. The director and writer Neill Blomkamp (who is not Peter Jackson who was just a producer and helped get it made) is from South Africa and used the film to share his feelings about the subject and help others understand the awful apartheid situation. The film could easily generalize to any situation where there are displaced peoples, such as the Palestinians, or could even be used as a commentary on modern attitudes towards legal and illegal immigration. At a more basic level it's a look at the classic 'us vs. them' attitude that causes most of the problems in the world. In this way I think District 9 is a very important film. Because it's an action/sci-fi flick it might get people in the theater who normally don't think about these issues and hopefully at least a few people change their minds how they feel about others who could be in situations analogous to the 'prawns' in District 9.
Blomkamp really shows a lot of skill in this directorial debut, especially with his treatment of the aliens. The 'prawns' (as they are derisively called in the film) are initially very weird and disgusting. He follows a long line of sci-fi that imagines aliens as being insectoids who really look nothing like intelligent life on this Earth. Although some might think this is unoriginal, I think it's wholly reasonable to expect intelligent life on other planets to evolve from insects similar to the ones on Earth. They are just way too successful evolutionarily speaking to not expect similar forms to arise on other Earth-like planets (this is critical because if the planet was not Earth-like all bets are off). Anyway, the aliens are pretty gross and they excrete all sorts of fluids, are both slimy and gangly, love cat food and very hard to initially like. I think this is a master stroke because as humans the audience's initial reaction has to be repulsion, so that the humans actions in the movie seem reasonable. However, after you look more at the aliens on a personal level their human-like eyes give away a soul that once you see it, your empathy for them begins to grow. In fact very quickly the aliens become the ones you root for, and you begin to cheer for the aliens at the expense of their oppressors.
Another interesting stroke is the physical characterization of the aliens. They are portrayed as being very fast, strong, agile, and are easily 7 foot on average. However they are also constantly pushed around by the humans being abused, beaten, and often killed for no reason at all. They hardly fight back and mostly do whatever the humans say. We are not used to seeing large insectoid aliens being pushed around by humans so easily, and the images are fairly startling. You just want to scream 'come on! rip his arms off!' because they surely have the ability, but it's pretty depressing to watch the resigned aliens kneel down and accept their fate.
There have been some complaints about the last 1/3 of the film, mostly because it turns into a straight-up action movie but I was never annoyed or bored. Oftentimes I find myself really bored with action scenes that are too long and that drag on. People like explosions, but if we don't have a rooting interest in the action how are the directors to expect the audience to care about what's going on. Furthermore, in modern movies action scenes tend to involve lots of quick cuts that create convoluted scenes. District 9 has none of these problems and I found the action exciting and refreshing. In fact for me, the movie went by in a breeze and after the end I was left asking 'wait, that's it?'.
After a disappointing summer for films, District 9 is probably my favorite 'big' movie of the summer. It never really reaches the heights of last year's Dark Knight, but District 9 succeeds as both a high concept film and as a standard sci-fi action movie. The film never bogs itself down in unnecessary explanation, and expects the audience to put pieces together or to come up with explanations ourselves. District 9 is another great film in the long line of sci-fi (Children of Men, Starship Troopers, various incarnations of Star Trek, etc...) that uses the genre to comment on difficult social situations in our current times in interesting and novel ways.
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