District 9 Review
This movie made me giddy. which hasn’t happened this summer probably since Up. It’s about aliens living in a ghetto in Johannesburg, and a spineless bureaucrat who ends up way more intimately involved with them than he ever wanted.
District 9 is what movies should be, filled with ideas but not comprised as far as entertainment value by an overabundance of them, instead it’s the ideas that give the action oomph.
It also gives us a fairly unlikeable lead who only grows more unlikeable really for most of the movie, making where the film finally takes us all the more satisfying.
From what I’ve read the lead, Sharlto Copley, was a high school friend of writer-director Neil Blomkamp and had never done feature work before. Well he’s fantastic. So take that, anyone who thought it was crazy to cast him.
Also take that to whoever scuttled Halo, which Blomkamp worked on for 5 months only to see the project fall apart. Perhaps it fell apart because the higher ups were worried Blomkamp couldn’t handle their giant movie. Perhaps now they feel really dumb. Blomkamp has said he wouldn’t want to do Halo now, and that’s a damn shame because his Halo would have been incredible.
District 9 totally invests the viewer into it’s world, and endears us so much to these mistreated aliens, who stand in for pretty much every oppressed minority ever.
It’s also got stunning action scenes and cringe-inducing grossout FX as the lead changes gradually into an alien.
Bottom line, it’s fantastic please go see it right now.