District 9
Neill Blomkamp
Aliens appear out of nowhere over the Joburg skies with a massive spaceship that hovers menacingly... and then just stays there, doing nothing. When humans finally get up the courage to go and have a look they find an alien refugee population on its last (insect-like) legs, and take them down to a temporary camp.
Fast forward some 20 years to where District 9 picks up, and the "prawns", as they've been dubbed, are living in squatter camp squalor, just another problem for the South African authorities. Responsibility for moving them on has fallen to the shadowy MNU agency, headed up by a naive official, Wikus van der Merwe (played with brilliant range from newcomer Sharlto Copley) who starts out like a character from a SA version of The Office, and ends up... well, in a pretty different place altogether.
District 9 has already been the surprise hit of the summer in the States, which is great, as it's the sort of film that might have slipped under the radar. It's a sci-fi that's got something to say and uses the genre to say it, with brilliant effects used to make both the aliens and their hovering ship blend into the washed out South African city backdrop. What it's actually saying is perhaps less clear - do the aliens unite a post-Apartheid South Africa at last? Or just add another dimension to the racial politics? Or is it more concerned with the abdication of state responsibility to private security firms?
With this and the cerebral Moon earlier this year it's probably too soon to hope that we're on the threshold of a new sci-fi renaissance here (and the Thundercats impressions of Avatar so far don't bode too well), but it's fun to see sci-fi getting smarter again - and to be giving us a story where we don't know what's going to happen.
Fans of Blomkamp's excellent short Alive in Joburg (check out our preview way back in 2006) won't be disappointed - this builds on the idea of seeing aliens land somewhere other than New York or Tokyo to great effect. Recommended.
4th Sep 2009 - Tumblr
3.5