- Location: Cinemark Egyptian 24
- When we first meet Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), he's battling with a clip-on microphone that he never really succeeds in securing. His mother happily recalls that Wikus was more friendly than intelligent as a child, and it seems that his condition has hardly changed with age. We therefore anticipate that a certain amount of mayhem will result when Wikus is selected to lead the eviction of the alien "Prawns" from their homes. As the archival newsreels and documentary interviews inform us, the arthropodian Prawns arrived on Earth some years ago in a state of extreme decrepitude. Theories abound as to precisely why their spaceship stopped above Johannesburg and exactly what happened to their leaders, but the fact is that the world suddenly found itself harboring an unexpected population of alien refugees. Soon their temporary encampments degrade into crime-ridden slums, and it now falls upon Wikus to move millions of Prawn to a new high-security camp comfortably outside of the city limits.
- As expected, Wikus' team stumbles out of the gate in spectacular fashion. As far as I can tell, they never actually secure a single legitimate alien signature (assuming such things even exist), instead preferring to initiate firefights at the slightest sign of Prawn hostility. More successful are the team's secondary objectives, which involve the confiscation of weapon caches and the alarmingly casual forced abortion of Prawn eggs. On one such raid, Wikus discovers a chemistry lab containing an alien cylinder that, depending on the circumstances, either sprays a mutation-inducing black fluid in the user's face or powers a spaceship. Several vomiting episodes later, Wikus' emerging alien claw seems to suggest that this item should have had a clearer warning label. Predictably, Wikus' employers (a nebulous L. L. C. known as Multi-National Incorporated) are happy to let him suffer for the advancement of alien R & D, particularly when they discover that he can fire Prawn weaponry, which had heretofore been inoperable by humans. Now Wikus must rely on the help of a Prawn scientist named Christopher Johnson if he hopes to evade both the trigger-happy military and the surprisingly indiscriminate culinary tastes of a troop of Nigerian gangsters.
- The basic premise behind District 9, namely that an alien race could become marginalized on Earth despite their requisite technological sophistication, is fairly original, and the film's first half does an excellent job introducing and developing this odd set of circumstances. The idea of having an inept bureaucrat serve eviction notices to a bunch of cat-food craving, ghetto-confined aliens is completely absurd, and that's the point. It doesn't take much imagination to connect the setting and Dutch surnames to a real-world absurdity that I'm sure is all-too-familiar to South African-born director Neill Blomkamp. Unfortunately, the film allows this premise to devolve into a fairly standard action picture. Although District 9's visual effects and settings are uniformly outstanding, the film is slightly tainted by several displays of bad taste that, perhaps unsurprisingly, remind me of Peter Jackson before he became a better director. The film's plot, too, is a problem, raising several interesting questions that never get adequately answered. In an interview with the A.V. Club, Blomkamp stated that he didn't want to film to become a "Hollywood spoon-feeding festival." While I genuinely appreciate the sentiment, I also wish he had served us something that was slightly more appetizing and fulfilling.
- Did that one alien gun launch...a dead pig?
- Sample plot questions: Why did it take so long to gather the fluid? Why would operating the scout ship kickstart the other alien devices? How did they bury the scout ship without being seen? Why did the fluid mutate Wikus?
