District 9

District 9

USA, 2009, cert 15, director: Neill Blomkamp, 112 minutes. Cast: Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood

Take City of God, fill it with the bugs from Starship Troopers and throw in a ton of gross body horror that’s straight out of The Fly, and you’ve got District 9. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of concepts and images, but Neill Blomkamp stitches the creature together with such precision that it doesn’t lurch or moan. It glides, and it sings.

A flying saucer appears over Johannesburg, but when human scientists finally pluck up the courage to cut their way inside, it’s more like the New Orleans Superdome after hurricane Katrina than anything from Close Encounters or 2001. My God... it’s full of shit! Nicknamed ‘prawns’ by the unsympathetic locals, thousands of destitute ETs are tossed into a shanty town where they pawn their ray guns to feed their cat food addiction. Don’t judge them, we’ve all been there...

Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is a middle-management drip sent to trick the ghetto prawns into signing documents so that their forced eviction looks a little less like what it is. Sure, he torches a few fetuses, and he raps on the aliens’ shack doors like the hellish spawn of Inglorious Basterds’ Jew Hunter and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but he’s not a bad man. He’s just a moron. Then one day he’s sprayed with a weird alien goop, and before long Wikus starts going through some serious changes.

Copley’s stellar performance makes Wikus’ transformation far more real than the film’s formidable special effects ever could. It’s absolutely necessary too, in order to give the silly little dork any depth or emotional resonance. Wikus, goes from laughing stock to action hero within the space of about an hour, and it’s totally, rivetingly credible. Not an easy feat when your costar is a six-foot computer generated prawn, but Copley pulls it off magnificently. The design of the prawns is equally perfect; they’re utterly alien, but there’s a nuance to their movements and expressions that suggests a genuine soul. You really feel for the poor, stinking buggers.

Of course, the movie is all about apartheid. This is old-school sci-fi, making us see familiar problems from new perspectives. Racial hatred is more palatable if you throw in a few prawns. Peter Jackson’s influence is felt throughout; the sci-fi elements aren’t thrust at the audience as an empty spectacle - every special effect and futuristic flourish has a purpose, and the result is a clever, satisfying movie experience with action sequences that are more thrilling than most of the summer’s cash-bloated epics.

Wikus winds up with body parts that don’t match, but he’s far better off that way. And that’s District 9 all over. After Moon I thought that we’d had this year’s quota of cool, intelligent science fiction, but I was wrong. District 9 is sensational.

8/10

-James