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 District 9 combines four different genres into one: pseudo-documentary, scifi, suspence, and horror (gore). I have to admit, I didn't know what I was getting into when I walked into the movie theater. The previews before the movie started gave me my first hint: almost exclusively horror flicks--but I wasn't deterred. My kids weren't as willing to stick it out, but we stayed anyway.
I believe the viewer should go into this experience prepared. And it is an experience.
The story begins as a pseudo-documentary on alien apartheid, then melds into a suspense when a human is sprayed with an alien substance, turns to horror/gore when the battles start (with blood and guts flung at the camera and body parts ripped off living beings), switches to a more scifi perspective (alien technology and desire to "return home,") and ends with the pseudo-documentary.
The Plot: An alien race was stranded above Johannesburg. When “rescue” workers drilled through the hull, they found starving aliens…and so they decided to provide them shelter on the planet. Over the course of 20 years, that shelter became like any refugee camp: overrun with crime, ripe with poverty, and an easy target for predators. In this case, the predators were MSN agents who used the aliens for technological arms research.
Because Johannesburg was too close to their encampment, District 9 was being evacuated and District 10 created—a blatant concentration camp. The movie is about what happened to one MSN agent who was “infected” when forcing the “prawns” to sign an evacuation order. He became the first “interspecies” example and, of course, everyone wanted a piece of him (literally) for their research.
Faced with dissection at the hands of MSN or living amongst District 9, the choice was obvious. His escape, personal relationship with the prawns who just wanted to return to their own home world, mis-propaganda about him, the constant fight against being captured, and the promise that the prawn could restore him to his former self, drives the remainder of the story.
Review: For my family, it was a hate or love it scenario. I loved it. My daughters and husband hated it. Ray thought it plodded along, taking too much time to develop the plot. My girls thought the gore was, well, gory. Me? I liked it because it was an alien apartheid story. I didn’t mind the extra time to develop the story.
Unlike so many other alien stories, these aliens had no powers. They had to deal with whatever life handed them. For the prawns, that was abuse and the helplessness of being misunderstood, feared, and treated like vermin rather than intelligent life. For me, there was a special poignancy in seeing how MSN didn't just cage the prawns, but sabotaged their efforts to better their life and ultimately escape their earth-bound prison. Any sign of intelligence was ruthlessly suppressed and technology confiscated. In other words, though humans didn't want the burden of housing the prawns, they didn't want them leaving either--not when they could be used for other nefarious purposes.
Recommendation: I really couldn’t predict what kind of viewer would enjoy this movie. Some might go for the underlying story (apartheid), others for the gore (almost all the previews before the movie were for gore flicks), and others for the scifi elements. Some might find that it doesn’t satisfy them in any of these elements. It’s a mixed bag, really. |
