Review: District 9 - Yes it has spoilers…
THERE ARE SPOILERS IN HERE, TOO.
There okay. I feel better now.
District 9 was not at all what I expected it to be. I actually went into the movie with little knowledge but the fact that it took place in Africa, and that there were aliens being treated like Japanese work-camp prisoners.
A movie that didn’t promise much but flashy effects actually turned out to be REALLY good, and REALLY gory.
The story plays like a mockumentary of a civilian containment effort, documenting the 20-year saga of the “Prawns”, a clicky-speaking, crustacean-like alien race, who have crash-landed in Johannesburg and are unable to leave. With no place to go, a settlement area is set up… make that a hideous slum is set up… and the Prawns live out a miserable existence riddled with illegal trade and a strange narcotic obsession with… of all things… cat food.
When the intergalactic shit hits the fan, it’s mostly made of humans. This movie was FAR gorier than I had anticipated (to Ed’s delight,) with bodies turning into mist, random smatterings of previously intact humanity splashing the camera, crazy black alien-vomit shooting out at random intervals, and some truly nasty prosthetic special effects decorating the story’s main character, Wikus.
Wikus is sort of a bumbling UN/Halliburton contractor foil who gets a distinct taste of how the other half lives when a fluid-filled canister bursts on him and starts to turn him into one of the baddies. Wikus goes from clown to bad-ass faster than you can say “Interspecies Prostitution” as he tries to win back his arm, his humanity, and the blonde-bombshell wife who he now scares the shit out of because of his nasty lobster claw.
While the movie has some distinctly Troma-like moments, it also gives you a pretty horrid picture of the way we treat “them.” Whoever “them” is… neighboring countries, religious heretics, people who annoy and/or repel us. It’s a fine piece of satire, and well worth the money if you can keep your gorge down while the body count rises (by the atom, in some cases.)
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