District 9

It's the low budget Sci-fi from a first time director that shows him to be a potentially great filmmaker. The style and visual achievements are nothing short of astounding and the story is a clever, engaging little yarn.

Sorry, for a second there I thought I was reviewing Moon again, but no, 2009 has thrown up another little gem of a movie that fits the above description. This one's a bit more rock 'em, sock'em and a bit dearer budget wise, plus it wasn't directed by David Bowie's son. Rather it was directed by the bloke who was meant to have done the Halo movie until that project fell through. So instead Niell Blomkamp, under the tutelage of Peter Jackson, went back to a short film he made, Alive In Joburg (available to view here), about aliens who live in South Africa. District 9 plays like an extended version of this.

Told partly like a documentary District 9 charts how aliens ended up getting stranded in Johannesburg and were shepherded into segregated areas which quickly became slum-like. Now the government has decided to move them to a camp outside the city and so the operation to shift them from their dwellings begins. This is where we meet Wikus (played amazingly well by first timer Sharlto Copley), a bureaucrat tasked with taking charge of the operation. While out knocking on alien doors he gets covered in an extra-terrestrial goo. Before long the man who hates "Prawns" has started to become one and realises his only help lies back in the slum of District 9.

Obvious comparisons with apartheid have been drawn. The setting and the littered "no alien" signs make it an easy conclusion to jump to. But this is also a film about how immigrants are treated. South Africa like many other countries has seen an influx of people looking for salvation in a new "promised land". Instead they are shepherded out into the slums and treated like criminals. District 9 makes the case for these people. Treating them this way will eventually make it so. In desperation they will turn to crime if they have no other options. It may not be the subtlest of social comments but it is clever how it is done.

The alien effects are simply stunning. District 9 was made for about $40 million and makes a mockery of efforts like the abysmal Transformers 2, which cost about five times more than District 9 to make yet both rely heavily on CGI. District 9 is the perfect case for showing that in the right hands CGI doesn't need to be detrimental to a movie. It also doesn't need huge sums of money thrown at it. Of course you can sense the Peter Jackson touch here, he's another man that knows how to stretch a budget and incorporate SFX effectively. The closest recent film to compare District 9 to would be Cloverfield. Both employ a realistic style to document the fantastical, using the latest effects to create realistic otherworldly beings in a believable context. But District 9 succeeds in every facet that Cloverfield failed in. The story's gripping and you genuinely care for the plight of Wikus. In Cloverfield the characters couldn't be killed off quick enough!

Sadly the documentary style established in the opening act, not just endless use of shaky cam but talking heads with "experts" talking about the incidents of the plot after the fact, is not maintained. At times we veer off into more conventional narrative filmmaking but this tends to be at points where none of the talking heads would know what happened. It's almost as if Blomkamp is suggesting that even documentary filmmaking can't be trusted, being just another style of storytelling that may not always have all the facts.

It's a minor grumble though. For the most part District 9 is simply superb. You get brilliantly realised bug-like aliens, exploding heads, a mecha suit and a performance from a first time actor that is stunning. Plus everyone speaks in a South African accent, entertainment in itself. "Fooking" never fails to raise a smile. Sure the plot descends a little too much into the blam blam in the second half, but the plight of Wikus will keep you going.

With District 9 Niell Blomkamp has left a calling card that will be hard to top. There are glimpses here that suggest that if he had been allowed to have made that Halo movie it would have finally been the great video game movie we've all been waiting for. As it stands that project's cancellation has been a secret blessing as we get this exhilarating piece of cinema instead. People will say "imagine what he could do with a big budget". I say don't give him it because restrictions on the monetary side clearly suit this guy, much like his mentor.