Movie Reviews this week looks at the Sci-fi fantasy District 9. This is a very surreal futuristic suspense thriller produced by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings Trilogy).
It stars an almost all South African cast, with Sharlto Copley in the lead role as Wikus Van De Merwe an NMU (Multinational United) who is in charge of relocating approximately 1 million aliens, whose spaceship has hovered to rest above Johannesburg, the aliens on first contact were all found to be malnourished, sick, and needing shelter.
The problem of course is housing over a million aliens, when the local populace are frightened by their looks, demeanour, and mannerisms as a local indigen paraphrased says "if there were from this planet we would understand but they are not even from this planet", they also have a penchant for cat food, as well as some sudden bursts of anger.
NMU has appointed the happy go lucky Wikus to for see the mass evacuation of these aliens, who the humans have termed "prauns" because they look like prawns.
The story is told in flashback, with several interviews from people who knew Wikus and the mass evacuation operation, you start to wonder what happened to Wikus as they all speak of some ominous event.
It turns out during the mass evacuations NMU had to serve each of the aliens with an evacuation order, where they had to sign, of course most of the aliens do not understand what an evacuation means, and there are violent scuffles, as Wikus accompanied with the mandatory NMU military personnel try to get the aliens to sign the evacuation order, in some cases according to Wikus, the aliens hitting the piece of paper away is counted as an agreement. The real reason of course for the evacuation according to the flashback interviews was to find alien weapons, it turns out the advanced weapons of the aliens are biologically engineered to be operated by them only.
Wikus also takes the opportunity during these evacuation notices to ransack the homes of the aliens looking for anything illegal, during the process he finds an object, he thinks is some kind of gas canister that could be a weapon, so he confiscates it, not before attempting to find out how it works, and getting sprayed in the face by a dark fluid. It turns out the alien who had that object was a little smarter than most of the "prauns" and the canister was needed to operate his shuttle hidden underground, back to the mother ship.
Inevitably Wikus gets involved with a violent "praun", and needs a cast on his left arm, but you notice soon after he is not looking well at all, culminating to him passing out puking black blood at a party, he is rushed to the hospital, and he wakes up alarmingly to find his left arm has adopted the features of a "praun". NMU military whisk him away to their medical facilities, where despite his protestions he is made to operate a series of alien weapons. He is regarded as the very first human and alien hybrid and the military arm of NMU are eager to harvest his organs for bioengineering. However Wikus just wants the alien arm removed, and wants to get back to his wife. He manages to escape, but chances of him going back home are made virtually impossible with all the media reporting malicious rumors about him and the entire NMU military arm looking for him.
He is left with no choice but to go back to the "prauns" he despises, in a desperate bid for help before the metamorphosis is complete.
It is mesmerising viewing, and Wikus captures the desperation of a man about to lose everything to the point of his humanity brilliantly.
District 9 is a rare science-fiction movie, as it is set in South Africa, but you realise soon after the reasons why, as it parallels victimisation of the "prauns" with apartheid.
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