If it’s true that there are only six basic stories to tell, “District 9” manages to combine its familiar elements in marvelously inventive ways.
What starts out as a straightforward analogy of apartheid turns into an alien horror interspecies buddy-film action-picture mockumentary, with a Transformer.
It’s been weeks since we’ve had one of those.
A giant spaceship hovers inert and ominous over Johannesburg. Its inhabitants, more than a million of them, are malnourished and listless; they are taken down to earth and housed in a temporary camp. This temporary camp becomes a permanent slum larger than most big cities, where the aliens live in crime-ridden squalor.
The giant corporation that runs South Africa (the film is set in 2010) decides that everyone would be happier -- the humans, at least -- if the shrimplike aliens were moved to an even worse place a couple of hundred miles away to do it.
The person they put in charge of the evictions, Wikus is the wrong man for the job. He’s weak, he’s ineffectual and he has the sometimes cruel hubris assumed by people who are certain they are of a superior race. His evictions lead to harassment, bullying and more killings than are strictly necessary.
But as played by the strikingly effective newcomer Sharlto Copley, Wikus changes. The more he learns about the humans’ treatment of the shrimp-like aliens (they’re derogatorily called “prawns”), the more sympathy he has for them. The evil corporation is especially interested in the prawns’ powerful weapons, which can only be fired by prawns.
The quasi-governmental corporation turns out to be the second largest producer of arms in the world, and is willing to go to great and greatly evil lengths to master the alien technology.
Director and co-writer Neil Blomkamp has given a great deal of thought to his premise -- it’s based on a six-minute short he made a few years ago -- and his filmmaking technique. The documentary style, featuring interviews with experts, each with his own agenda, is a hugely efficient way to present complicated exposition. Most of Blomkamp’s previous work has been in visual effects, which helps make the computer-generated imagery in this film shine, from the misty, looming spaceship to the precise, fluid movement of the aliens (except when they jump).
The film isn’t always easy to watch; it has a super-high ick factor. It has blood galore, and gore, and that thing, first seen in “Private Ryan,” where exploding bodies turn to red splashes of plasma. Even though it is well done, the violence becomes repetitive, and because of this the film goes on about 10 minutes too long.
But that’s a minor quibble. With “District 9,“ even though you’ve seen it all before, you’ve never seen anything like it.
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