District 9 (2009) Review

Standards are getting lower, I guess.

District 9 is another one of those films with a premise so irresistibly provocative that you can't help but instantly generate lofty expectations in your head after you come away from the trailer. Scifi fare that combines fantasy with just enough gritty realism to make it real is my favourite kind of Scifi. Some works deliver with aplomb; Children of Men, Firefly/Serenity, and Karen Traviss's SF novels. Neill Blomkamp comes close.

District 9's plot stays pretty fresh for most of the movie - alien refugees appear in South Africa, the government takes control, and the aliens become the center of discrimination, xenophobia, exploitation, experiments, and lots of death. The themes recall apartheid and stories I heard of Aryan attitudes towards the Jewish. All very morally-provoking stuff - unfortunately it's serious themes fall apart after the second third of the movie, pulling District 9 into a decline that it never bounces back from.

It looks like the filmmakers just went through the motions of creating a group for humanity to bully just so we can feel shameful and then after that say it's a profound experience. Much of the originality I hoped for never showed up; cookie cutter lines and characters galore. Once you ignore the gore (gore is cheap these days) it goes into it's "serious issues" about as far as a half-hour cartoon would go - which makes sense, because the director chose to spend a third of the film on explosions and action scenes.

What Blomkamp has done, boys and girls, is to poke your sympathy with a stick by abusing a bunch of "those poor guys", and before you realize that the themes are about as shallow as a tin of cat food, dazzles you with a massive, gratuitous action sequence and hope that you don't notice. District 9 is half promising/disturbing movie, half pointless explosive wankfest. The only truly good thing about this movie is that it raises awareness about xenophobia and forced resettlement (albeit dumbing them down significantly).